1 research outputs found
Quantitative Constraints on the Transport Properties of Hot Partonic Matter from Semi-Inclusive Single High Transverse Momentum Pion Suppression in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
The PHENIX experiment has measured the suppression of semi-inclusive single
high transverse momentum pi^0's in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV.
The present understanding of this suppression is in terms of energy-loss of the
parent (fragmenting) parton in a dense color-charge medium. We have performed a
quantitative comparison between various parton energy-loss models and our
experimental data. The statistical point-to-point uncorrelated as well as
correlated systematic uncertainties are taken into account in the comparison.
We detail this methodology and the resulting constraint on the model
parameters, such as the initial color-charge density dN^g/dy, the medium
transport coefficient , or the initial energy-loss parameter epsilon_0.
We find that high transverse momentum pi^0 suppression in Au+Au collisions has
sufficient precision to constrain these model dependent parameters at the +/1
20%-25% (one standard deviation) level. These constraints include only the
experimental uncertainties, and further studies are needed to compute the
corresponding theoretical uncertainties.Comment: 422 authors, 13 pages text, RevTeX-4, 9 figures, 2 tables. This
version is updated with changes made during the review process and is now the
same as what was published in Physical Review C. Plain text data tables for
the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are
publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm