Enhanced J/Psi Production in Deconfined Quark Matter

In high energy heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, each central event will contain multiple pairs of heavy quarks. if a region of deconfined quarks and gluons is formed, a new mechanism for the formation of heavy quarkonium bound states will be activated. This is a result of the mobility of heavy quarks in the deconfined region, such that bound states can be formed from a quark and an antiquark which were originally produced in separate incoherent interactions. Model estimates of this effect for J/psi production at RHIC indicate that significant enhancements are to be expected. Experimental observation of such enhanced production would provide evidence for deconfinement unlikely to be compatible with competing scenarios.Comment: Added predictions with nonthermal charm quark distributions, also with gluon dissociation replaced by screening. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

B_c Meson Production in Nuclear Collisions at RHIC

We study quantitatively the formation and evolution of B_c bound states in a space-time domain of deconfined quarks and gluons (quark-gluon plasma, QGP). At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) one expects for the first time that typical central collisions will result in multiple pairs of heavy (in this case charmed) quarks. This provides a new mechanism for the formation of heavy quarkonia which depends on the properties of the deconfined region. We find typical enhancements of about 500 fold for the B_c production yields over expectations from the elementary coherent hadronic B_c-meson production scenario. The final population of bound states may serve as a probe of the plasma phase parameters.Comment: 9 Pages, 11 Postscript Figure

Analysis of DCC Domain Structure

Wavelet-type methods are employed for the analysis of pion field configurations that have been obtained by dynamical simulations in idealized scenarios relevant to the formation of disoriented chiral condensates. It is illustrated how the measurement of the isospin domain structure depends on the ability to zoom in on limited parts of the phase space, due to the interplay between the pion correlation length and the effective source geometry. The need for advanced analysis methods is underscored by the fact that the extracted neutral-fraction distribution would differ significantly from the ideal form, even under perfect experimental conditions, and, moreover, by the circumstance that thermal sources with suitably adjusted temperatures can lead to distributions that may be practically indistinguishable from those arising from DCC-type non-equilibrium evolutions.Comment: 18 pages, Latex, 7 Figures included as .ps file