Enhanced production of direct photons in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV and implications for the initial temperature

421 authors from 58 institutions, 6 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letters. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htmlThe production of low mass e+e- pairs for m_{e+e-} < 300 MeV/c^2 and 1 < p_T <5 GeV/c is measured in p+p and Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV. Enhanced e+e- pair yield above hadronic sources is observed in Au+Au collisions. Treating the excess as internal conversion of direct photons, the invariant yield of direct photons is deduced. In central Au+Au collisions, the excess over p+p is exponential in p_T}, with inverse slope T = 221 +/- 23 (stat) +/- 18 (syst) MeV. Hydrodynamical models with initial temperatures T_init ~ 300-600 MeV at times of 0.6 - 0.15 fm/c after the collision are in qualitative agreement with the data. Lattice QCD predicts a phase transition at ~ 170 MeV

Photon-Hadron Jet Correlations in p+p and Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV

478 authors from 63 institutions, 14 pages, 8 figures, and 4 tables. Submitted to Physical Review CWe report the observation at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) of suppression of back-to-back correlations in the direct photon+jet channel in Au+Au relative to p+p collisions. Two-particle correlations of direct photon triggers with associated hadrons are obtained by statistical subtraction of the decay photon-hadron background. The initial momentum of the away-side parton is tightly constrained, because the parton-photon pair exactly balance in momentum at leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD), making such correlations a powerful probe of the in-medium parton energy loss. The away-side nuclear suppression factor, I_AA, in central Au+Au collisions, is 0.32 +/- 0.12(stat) +/- 0.09(syst) for hadrons of 3 < p_T < 5 in coincidence with photons of 5 < p_T < 15 GeV/c. The suppression is comparable to that observed for high-p_T single hadrons and dihadrons. The direct photon associated yields in p+p collisions scale approximately with the momentum balance, z_T = p_T^hadron/p_T^photon, as expected for a measure of the away-side parton fragmentation function. We compare to Au+Au collisions for which the momentum balance dependence of the nuclear modification should be sensitive to the path-length dependence of parton energy loss