1 research outputs found
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