The future of PHENIX: upgrading to sPHENIX and beyond

sPHENIX is a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector enabling high-rate, large acceptance measurements of upsilons, direct photons and fully reconstructed jets in p-p, p-A and A-A collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). These detailed measurements will probe the Quark Gluon Plasma near its transition temperature, in a region of strongest coupling. The sPHENIX detector consists of hadronic and electromagnetic calorimetry, and charged particle tracking in conjunction with the recently acquired 1.5 tesla BaBar super-conducting solenoid. The sPHENIX acceptance of 2π in azimuth and |η| < 1.1 in pseudo-rapidity provides a factor of six improvement over the present PHENIX central spectrometer. Beyond being an excellent RHIC detector, sPHENIX provides an outstanding foundation for a detector focused on the physics of a possible future electron-ion collider at RHIC (eRHIC). In this talk we will discuss the physics potential of the sPHENIX detector, the design and technology choices for the sPHENIX calorimeters, and the conceptual design of a day-one detector for eRHIC

A Measurement of Time-Averaged Aerosol Optical Depth using Air-Showers Observed in Stereo by HiRes

Air fluorescence measurements of cosmic ray energy must be corrected for attenuation of the atmosphere. In this paper we show that the air-showers themselves can yield a measurement of the aerosol attenuation in terms of optical depth, time-averaged over extended periods. Although the technique lacks statistical power to make the critical hourly measurements that only specialized active instruments can achieve, we note the technique does not depend on absolute calibration of the detector hardware, and requires no additional equipment beyond the fluorescence detectors that observe the air showers. This paper describes the technique, and presents results based on analysis of 1258 air-showers observed in stereo by the High Resolution Fly's Eye over a four year span.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by Astroparticle Physics Journa

Diffractive \eta_c and \eta_b productions by neutrinos via neutral currents

We report a first theoretical study for neutrino-induced diffractive productions of heavy pseudoscalar mesons, \eta_c and \eta_b, off a nucleon. Based on factorization formalism for exclusive processes, we evaluate the forward diffractive production cross section in perturbative QCD in terms of the light-cone Q\bar{Q} wave functions (WFs) of \eta_{c,b} mesons and the gluon distribution of the nucleon. The light-cone WFs of the \eta_c (\eta_b) meson are constructed to satisfy the spin symmetry relations with those of the J/\psi (\Upsilon) meson. The diffractive \eta_c production is governed by the axial-vector coupling of the longitudinally polarized Z boson to Q\bar{Q} pair, and the resulting \eta_c production rate is larger than the J/\psi one by one order of magnitude. We also discuss the production of bottomonium \eta_b, which shows up for higher beam energy.Comment: REVTex4, 4 pages with 3 embedded figure

Mass spectra of doubly heavy Omega_QQ' baryons

We evaluate the masses of baryons composed of two heavy quarks and a strange quark with account for spin-dependent splittings in the framework of potential model with the KKO potential motivated by QCD with a three-loop beta-function for the effective charge consistent with both the perturbative limit at short distances and linear confinement term at long distances between the quarks. The factorization of dynamics is supposed and explored in the nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation for the motion in the system of two heavy quarks constituting the doubly heavy diquark and the strange quark interaction with the diquark. The limits of approach, its justification and uncertainties are discussed. Excited quasistable states are classified by the quantum numbers of heavy diquark composed by the heavy quarks of the same flavor.Comment: 14 pages, revtex4-file, 3 eps-figures, 5 tables, typos correcte

Measurement of Bottom versus Charm as a Function of Transverse Momentum with Electron-Hadron Correlations in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV

The momentum distribution of electrons from semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom for mid-rapidity |y|<0.35 in p+p collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV is measured by the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) over the transverse momentum range 2 < p_T < 7 GeV/c. The ratio of the yield of electrons from bottom to that from charm is presented. The ratio is determined using partial D/D^bar --> e^{+/-} K^{-/+} X (K unidentified) reconstruction. It is found that the yield of electrons from bottom becomes significant above 4 GeV/c in p_T. A fixed-order-plus-next-to-leading-log (FONLL) perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculation agrees with the data within the theoretical and experimental uncertainties. The extracted total bottom production cross section at this energy is \sigma_{b\b^bar}= 3.2 ^{+1.2}_{-1.1}(stat) ^{+1.4}_{-1.3}(syst) micro b.Comment: 432 authors, 6 pages text, 3 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. 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.htm

A Likelihood Method for Measuring the Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Ray Composition

Air fluorescence detectors traditionally determine the dominant chemical composit ion of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray flux by comparing the averaged slant depth of the shower maximum, $X_{max}$, as a function of energy to the slant depths expect ed for various hypothesized primaries. In this paper, we present a method to make a direct measurement of the expected mean number of protons and iron by comparing the shap es of the expected $X_{max}$ distributions to the distribution for data. The advantages of this method includes the use of information of the full distribution and its ability to calculate a flux for various cosmic ray compositi ons. The same method can be expanded to marginalize uncertainties due to choice of spectra, hadronic models and atmospheric parameters. We demonstrate the technique with independent simulated data samples from a parent sample of protons and iron. We accurately predict the number of protons and iron in the parent sample and show that the uncertainties are meaningful.Comment: 11 figures, 22 pages, accepted by Astroparticle Physic

Alternative Methods to Finding Patterns in HiRes Stereo Data

In this paper Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays UHECRs data observed by the HiRes fluorescence detector in stereo mode is analyzed to search for events in the sky with an arrival direction lying on a great circle. Such structure is known as the arc structure. The arc structure is expected when the charged cosmic rays pass through the galactic magnetic field. The arcs searched for could represent a broad or a small scale anisotropy depending on the proposed source model for the UHECRs. The Arcs in this paper are looked for using Hough transform were Hough transform is a technique used to looking for patterns in images. No statistically significant arcs were found in this study