Emission patterns of neutral pions in 40 A MeV Ta+Au reactions

Differential cross sections of neutral pions emitted in 181Ta + 197Au collisions at a beam energy of 39.5A MeV have been measured with the photon spectrometer TAPS. The kinetic energy and transverse momentum spectra of neutral pions cannot be properly described in the framework of the thermal model, nor when the reabsorption of pions is accounted for in a phenomenological model. However, high energy and high momentum tails of the pion spectra can be well fitted through thermal distributions with unexpectedly soft temperature parameters below 10 MeV.Comment: 16 pages (double-spaced), 5 figures; corrections after referee's comments and suggestion

Cross Section Ratios between different CM energies at the LHC: opportunities for precision measurements and BSM sensitivity

The staged increase of the LHC beam energy provides a new class of interesting observables, namely ratios and double ratios of cross sections of various hard processes. The large degree of correlation of theoretical systematics in the cross section calculations at different energies leads to highly precise predictions for such ratios. We present in this letter few examples of such ratios, and discuss their possible implications, both in terms of opportunities for precision measurements and in terms of sensitivity to Beyond the Standard Model dynamics.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure

Constraints for the nuclear parton distributions from Z and W production at the LHC

The LHC is foreseen to finally bring also the nuclear collisions to the TeV scale thereby providing new possibilities for physics studies, in particular related to the electro-weak sector of the Standard Model. We study here the Z and W production in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC, concentrating on the prospects of testing the factorization and constraining the nuclear modifications of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Especially, we find that the rapidity asymmetries in proton-nucleus collisions, arising from the differences in the PDFs between the colliding objects, provide a decisive advantage in comparison to the rapidity-symmetric nucleus-nucleus case. We comment on how such studies will help to improve our knowledge of the nuclear PDFs.Comment: The version accepted for publication in JHEP. New figures has been added, and we also discuss the single charged lepton productio

The strong interaction at the collider and cosmic-rays frontiers

First data on inclusive particle production measured in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are compared to predictions of various hadron-interaction Monte Carlos (QGSJET, EPOS and SIBYLL) used commonly in high-energy cosmic-ray physics. While reasonable overall agreement is found for some of the models, none of them reproduces consistently the sqrt(s) evolution of all the measured observables. We discuss the implications of the new LHC data for the modeling of the non-perturbative and semihard parton dynamics in hadron-hadron and cosmic-rays interactions at the highest energies studied today.Comment: 7 pages, Proceeds. Workshop "30 years of strong interactions", Spa, Belgium, 6-8 April 2011. Elsevier to appea

Jet Tomography in the Forward Direction at RHIC

Hadron production at high-$p_T$ displays a strong suppression pattern in a wide rapidity region in heavy ion collisions at RHIC energies. This finding indicates the presence of strong final state effects for both transversally and longitudinally traveling partons, namely induced energy loss. We have developed a perturbative QCD based model to describe hadron production in $pp$ collision, which can be combined with the Glauber -- Gribov model to describe hadron production in heavy ion collisions. Investigating $AuAu$ and $CuCu$ collisions at energy $\sqrt{s}=200$ $A$GeV at mid-rapidity, we find the opacity of the strongly interacting hot matter to be proportional to the participant nucleon number. Considering forward rapidities, the suppression pattern indicates the formation of a longitudinally contracted dense deconfined zone in central heavy ion collisions. We determine parameters for the initial geometry from the existing data.Comment: 6 pages for Hot Quarks '06 Conferenc

Estimates of hadron azimuthal anisotropy from multiparton interactions in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 14 TeV

We estimate the amount of collective "elliptic flow" expected at mid-rapidity in proton-proton (p-p) collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), assuming that any possible azimuthal anisotropy of the produced hadrons with respect to the plane of the reaction follows the same overlap-eccentricity and particle-density scalings as found in high-energy heavy ion collisions. Using a Glauber eikonal model, we compute the p-p eccentricities, transverse areas and particle-multiplicities for various phenomenological parametrisations of the proton spatial density. For realistic proton transverse profiles, we find integrated elliptic flow v2 parameters below 3% in p-p collisions at sqrt(s) = 14 TeV.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures. Very minor mods. Version to appear in EPJ-

Photon Production in Hot and Dense Strongly Interacting Matter

This text is meant as an introduction to the theoretical physics of photon emission in hot and dense strongly interacting matter, the principal application being relativistic nuclear collisions. We shall cover some of the results and techniques appropriate for studies at SPS, RHIC, and LHC energiesComment: 35 pages, accepted for publication, Landolt-Boernstein Volume 1-23

Multiplicity Studies and Effective Energy in ALICE at the LHC

In this work we explore the possibility to perform ``effective energy'' studies in very high energy collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In particular, we focus on the possibility to measure in $pp$ collisions the average charged multiplicity as a function of the effective energy with the ALICE experiment, using its capability to measure the energy of the leading baryons with the Zero Degree Calorimeters. Analyses of this kind have been done at lower centre--of--mass energies and have shown that, once the appropriate kinematic variables are chosen, particle production is characterized by universal properties: no matter the nature of the interacting particles, the final states have identical features. Assuming that this universality picture can be extended to {\it ion--ion} collisions, as suggested by recent results from RHIC experiments, a novel approach based on the scaling hypothesis for limiting fragmentation has been used to derive the expected charged event multiplicity in $AA$ interactions at LHC. This leads to scenarios where the multiplicity is significantly lower compared to most of the predictions from the models currently used to describe high energy $AA$ collisions. A mean charged multiplicity of about 1000-2000 per rapidity unit (at $\eta \sim 0$) is expected for the most central $Pb-Pb$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.5 TeV$.Comment: 12 pages, 19 figures. In memory of A. Smirnitski

The spectrum of high-energy cosmic rays measured with KASCADE-Grande

The energy spectrum of cosmic rays between 10**16 eV and 10**18 eV, derived from measurements of the shower size (total number of charged particles) and the total muon number of extensive air showers by the KASCADE-Grande experiment, is described. The resulting all-particle energy spectrum exhibits strong hints for a hardening of the spectrum at approximately 2x10**16 eV and a significant steepening at c. 8x10**16 eV. These observations challenge the view that the spectrum is a single power law between knee and ankle. Possible scenarios generating such features are discussed in terms of astrophysical processes that may explain the transition region from galactic to extragalactic origin of cosmic rays.Comment: accepted by Astroparticle Physics June 201

Electromagnetic Probes

A review is presented of dilepton and real photon measurements in relativistic heavy ion collisions over a very broad energy range from the low energies of the BEVALAC up to the highest energies available at RHIC. The dileptons cover the invariant mass range \mll = 0 - 2.5 GeV/c$^2$, i.e. the continuum at low and intermediate masses and the light vector mesons, $\rho, \omega, \phi$. The review includes also measurements of the light vector mesons in elementary reactions.Comment: To be published in Landolt-Boernstein Volume 1-23A; 40 pages, 24 figures. Final version updated with small changes to the text, updated references and updated figure