The Role of Gluon Depletion in J/psi Suppression

The depletion of gluons as the parton flux traverses a nucleus in a heavy-ion collision can influence the production rate of heavy-quark states. Thus the suppression of $J/\psi$ can be due to gluon depletion in the initial state in addition to nuclear and hadronic absorption in the final state. A formalism is developed to describe the depletion effect. It is shown that, without constraints from other experimental facts beside the $J/\psi$ suppression data in $pA$ and $AB$ collisions, it is not possible to determine the relative importance of depletion vs absorption. Possible relevance to the enhanced suppression seen in the $Pb - Pb$ data is mentioned but not studied.Comment: 12 pages + 2 figures (in ps file), LaTex, Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Strange particle production in 158 and 40 AA GeV/cc Pb-Pb and p-Be collisions

Results on strange particle production in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 and 40 $A$ GeV/$c$ beam momentum from the NA57 experiment at CERN SPS are presented. Particle yields and ratios are compared with those measured at RHIC. Strangeness enhancements with respect to p-Be reactions at the same beam momenta have been also measured: results about their dependence on centrality and collision energy are reported and discussed.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the "Hot Quarks 2004" Conference, July 18-24 2004, New Mexico, USA, submitted to Journal of Physics G 7 pages, 5 figure

Results on cascade production in lead-lead interactions from the NA57 experiment

The NA57 experiment has been designed to study the production of strange and multi-strange particles in Pb-Pb and p-Be collisions at the CERN SPS. The predecessor experiment WA97 has measured an enhanced abundance of strange particles in Pb-Pb collisions relative to p-A reactions at 160 GeV/c per nucleon beam momentum. NA57 has extended the WA97 measurements to investigate the evolution of the strangeness enhancement pattern as a function of the beam energy and over a wider centrality range. In this paper, we report results on cascade production for about the 60% most central collisions at 160 GeV/c per nucleon

Determination of the number of wounded nucleons in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c

The charged particle multiplicity distributions measured by two experiments, WA97 and NA57, in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c have been analyzed in the framework of the wounded nucleon model (WNM). We obtain a good description of the data within the centrality range of our samples. This allows us to make use of the measured multiplicities to estimate the number of wounded nucleons of the collision

Nucleon number dependence of longitudinal radii in ion-ion collisions as a signature of onset of collective expansion

In an attempt to disentangle the effects of nuclear geometry from those of nuclear geometry we study dependence of longitudinal radius on nucleon numbers of colliding nuclei within a simple model of multiple nucleon- nucleon collisions.We discuss two approaches to resulting simple formula.In the former the data up to S-Au can be described by nuclear geometry at the price of two parameters,but R_L for Pb-Pb is significantly larger than geometry can accomodate, indicating an onset of a new dynamics. In the latter even collisions induced by lighter ions give evidence of some collective behaviour and the increase of R_L for Pb-Pb indicates again the onset of a new dynamics.Comment: 10 pages in TeX, 1 Fig. as a ps-file Preceding version contained in one place an erroneous factor of 2,which propagated to some other places.Conclusions remain unchanged. Comenius University Bratislava preprint, April 199