2 research outputs found
Is Strangeness still interesting at RHIC ?
With the advent of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven
National Laboratory (BNL), Heavy Ion Physics will enter a new energy regime.
The question is whether the signatures proposed for the discovery of a phase
transition from hadronic matter to a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), that were
established on the basis of collisions at the BEVALAC, the AGS, and the SPS,
respectively, are still useful and detectable at these high incident energies.
In the past two decades, measurements related to strangeness formation in the
collision were advocated as potential signatures and were tested in numerous
fixed target experiments at the AGS and the SPS. In this article I will review
the capabilities of the RHIC detectors to measure various aspects of
strangeness, and I will try to answer the question whether the information
content of those measurements is comparable to the one at lower energies.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Invited Talk at the IV International Conference
on Strangeness in Quark Matter, Padova (Italy), July 20-24, 199
Scaling properties in bulk and p-dependent particle production near midrapidity in relativistic heavy ion collisions
The centrality dependence of the midrapidity charged-particle multiplicity
density (1) is presented for Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at RHIC over
a broad range of collision energies. The multiplicity measured in the Cu+Cu
system is found to be similar to that measured in the Au+Au system, for an
equivalent N, with the observed factorization in energy and
centrality still persistent in the smaller Cu+Cu system. The extent of the
similarities observed for bulk particle production is tested by a comparative
analysis of the inclusive transverse momentum distributions for Au+Au and Cu+Cu
collisions near midrapidity. It is found that, within the uncertainties of the
data, the ratio of yields between the various energies for both Au+Au and Cu+Cu
systems are similar and constant with centrality, both in the bulk yields as
well as a function of p, up to at least 4 GeV/. The effects of
multiple nucleon collisions that strongly increase with centrality and energy
appear to only play a minor role in bulk and intermediate transverse momentum
particle production.Comment: Submitted for publication in Phys. Rev. C, 5 pages, 3 figure