Quarkonia measurements in heavy-ion collisions in CMS

The production of quarkonia is one of the most promising signals at the LHC for the study of the production properties of Quark Gluon Plasma. In addition to the J/psi, the extent to which upsilon is suppressed should give much insight into the new state of matter. The large muon acceptance and the high precision tracker make the CMS detector ideal for studies of this physics. In this note, the performance of the CMS detector for quarkonia measurements in heavy-ion collisions in the dimuon channel is presented. Dimuon reconstruction efficiencies and mass resolution are calculated using detailed detector simulation. Mass spectra and signal to background ratios are estimated with a fast Monte Carlo program. Results obtained with the fast Monte Carlo are compared with more detailed simulations

Charmonium dynamics in heavy ion collisions

Applying the HSD transport approach to charmonium dynamics within the 'hadronic comover model' and the 'QGP melting scenario', we show that the suppression pattern seen at RHIC cannot be explained by the interaction with baryons, comoving mesons and/or by color screening mechanism. The interaction with hadrons in the late stages of the collision (when the energy density falls below the critical) gives a sizable contribution to the suppression. On the other hand, it does not account for the observed additional charmonium dissociation and its dependence on rapidity. Together with the failure of the hadron-string models to reproduce high v2 of open charm mesons, this suggests strong pre-hadronic interaction of c-cbar with the medium at high energy densities.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the international conference on "Strangeness in Quark Matter", 24-29 June 2007, Levoca, Slovaki

Observation des états excités des hypernoyaux de masse 4

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Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC

The ion-ion center of mass energies at the LHC will exceed that at RHIC by nearly a factor of 30, providing exciting opportunities for addressing unique physics issues in a completely new energy domain. Some highlights of this new physics domain are presented here. We briefly describe how these collisions will provide new insights into the high density, low momentum gluon content of the nucleus expected to dominate the dynamics of the early state of the system. We then discuss how the dense initial state of the nucleus affects the lifetime and temperature of the produced system. Finally, we explain how the high energy domain of the LHC allows abundant production of `rare' processes, hard probes calculable in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, QCD. At the LHC, high momentum jets and $b \bar b$ bound states, the $\Upsilon$ family, will be produced with high statistics for the first time in heavy ion collisions.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of INPC 04 in Goteborg, Sweden, July 2004, includes conference style fil

J/psi Absorption in Heavy Ion Collisions

We present a new calculation of the pi-J/psi dissociation cross sections within the Constituent Quark-Meson Model recently introduced. To discuss the absorption of J/psi in heavy-ion collisions, we assume the J/psi to be produced inside a thermalized pion gas, as discussed by Bjorken, and introduce the corrections due to absorption by nuclear matter as well. We fit the absorption length of the J/psi to the data obtained at the CERN SPS by the NA50 Collaboration for Pb-Pb collisions. Collisions of lower centrality allow us to determine the temperature and the energy density of the pion gas. For both these quantities we find values close to those indicated by lattice gauge calculations for the transition to a quark-gluon plasma. A simple extrapolation to more central collisions, which takes into account the increase of the energy deposited due to the increased nucleon flux, fails to reproduce the break in J/psi absorption indicated by NA50, thus lending support to the idea that an unconfined quark-gluon phase may have been produced. This conclusion could be sharpened by analysing in a similar way, as a function of centrality, other observables such as strange particle production.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Charm and beauty of the Large Hadron Collider

With the acceleration of lead nuclei in the LHC, heavy-ion physics will enter a new energy domain. One of the main novelties introduced by the 30-fold energy-jump from RHIC to the LHC is the abundant heavy-quark production. After discussing a few examples of physics issues that can be addressed using heavy quarks, we present a selection of results on the expected experimental capability of ALICE, the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the LHC, in the open-heavy-flavour sector.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Invited talk at Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM) 2004, Cape Town, South Africa, 15-20 September 2004. Submitted to J. Phys.

Heavy-quarkonium interaction in QCD at finite temperature

We explore the temperature dependence of the heavy-quarkonium interaction based on the Bhanot-Peskin leading order perturbative QCD analysis. The Wilson coefficients are computed solving the Schrodinger equation in a screened Coulomb heavy-quark potential. The inverse Mellin transform of the Wilson coefficients then allows for the computation of the 1S and 2S heavy-quarkonium gluon and pion total cross section at finite screening/temperature. As a phenomenological illustration, the temperature dependence of the 1S charmonium thermal width is determined and compared to recent lattice QCD results.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures. Clarification added, published versio

Estimation of Collision Impact Parameter

We demonstrate that the nuclear collision geometry (i.e. impact parameter) can be determined with 1.5 fm accuracy in an event-by-event analysis by measuring the transverse energy flow in the pseudorapidity region $3 \le |\eta| \le 5$ with a minimal dependence on collision dynamics details at the LHC energy scale. Using the HIJING model we have illustrated our calculation by a simulation of events of nucleus-nucleus interactions at the c.m.s energy from 1 up to 5.5 TeV per nucleon and various type of nuclei.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Pt-imbalance in dimuon+jet production as a signal of partonic energy loss in heavy ion collisions at LHC

We consider a hard jet production tagged by a muon pair in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. The process cross section is calculated by the CompHEP Monte-Carlo generator taking into account full gamma*/Z interference pattern at LHC energies. We have found that reasonable statistics, ~1000 events per 1 month of LHC run with lead beams, can be expected for realistic geometrical acceptance and kinematic cuts. The transverse momentum imbalance due to interactions of jet partons in the medium is evaluated for mu+mu-pair+jet correlation, as well as for the correlation between mu+mu- pair and a leading particle in a jet. Theoretical and experimental uncertainties of these observables are discussed.Comment: 17 pages in LaTeX including 5 eps-figure