A Detailed Study of High-pT Neutral Pion Suppression and Azimuthal Anisotropy in Au+Au Collisions at \sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV

Measurements of neutral pion production at midrapidity in sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions as a function of transverse momentum, p_T, collision centrality, and angle with respect to reaction plane are presented. The data represent the final pi^0 results from the PHENIX experiment for the first RHIC Au+Au run at design center-of-mass-energy. They include additional data obtained using the PHENIX Level-2 trigger with more than a factor of three increase in statistics over previously published results for p_T > 6 GeV/c. We evaluate the suppression in the yield of high-p_T pi^0's relative to point-like scaling expectations using the nuclear modification factor R_AA. We present the p_T dependence of R_AA for nine bins in collision centrality. We separately integrate R_AA over larger p_T bins to show more precisely the centrality dependence of the high-p_T suppression. We then evaluate the dependence of the high-p_T suppression on the emission angle \Delta\phi of the pions with respect to event reaction plane for 7 bins in collision centrality. We show that the yields of high-p_T pi^0's vary strongly with \Delta\phi, consistent with prior measurements. We show that this variation persists in the most peripheral bin accessible in this analysis. For the peripheral bins we observe no suppression for neutral pions produced aligned with the reaction plane while the yield of pi^0's produced perpendicular to the reaction plane is suppressed by more than a factor of 2. We analyze the combined centrality and \Delta\phi dependence of the pi^0 suppression in different p_T bins using different possible descriptions of parton energy loss dependence on jet path-length averages to determine whether a single geometric picture can explain the observed suppression pattern.Comment: 330 authors, pages text, RevTeX4, figures, tables. Submitted to Physical Review C. 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

Study of inclusive production of π± and protons in {Mathematical expression}p interactions at 32 GeV/c

Results are presented on the inclusive production of π± mesons and protons in {Mathematical expression}p interactions at an incident antiproton momentum of 32 GeV/c in the MIRABELLE bubble chamber, based on a sample of 55,000 inelastic events. The spectra of π+(π-) and p( {Mathematical expression}) are separated in the whole kinematically admitted region of phase space by a statistical method. The semi-inclusive and inclusive cross sections and the main average characteristics of π and p production are calculated. The invariant differential cross sections are studied as functions of the Fevnman scaling variable x, the rapidity and the transverse momentum. The x distribution of π± mesons in the proton fragmentation region does not show any significant contribution from quark exchange or annihilation processes. A possible contribution of hard quark scattering on mesons or baryons is observed for large transverse momenta. © 1982 Springer-Verlag.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe