Energy Dependence of Jet Quenching and Life-time of the Dense Matter in High-energy Heavy-ion Collisions

Suppression of high $p_T$ hadron spectra in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at different energies is studied within a pQCD parton model incorporating medium induced parton energy loss. The $p_T$ dependence of the nuclear modification factor $R_{AA}(p_T)$ is found to depend on both the energy dependence of the parton energy loss and the power-law behavior of the initial jet spectra. The high $p_T$ hadron suppression at $\sqrt{s}=62.4$ GeV and its centrality dependence are studied in detail. The overall values of the modification factor are found to provide strong constraints on the lifetime of the dense matter.Comment: 6 pages in RevTex with 3 postscript figure

Dihadron Correlation in Jets Produced in Heavy-Ion Collisions

The difference between the structures of jets produced in heavy-ion and hadronic collisions can best be exhibited in the correlations between particles within those jets. We study the dihadron correlations in jets in the framework of parton recombination. Two types of triggers, $\pi^+$ and proton, are considered. It is shown that the recombination of thermal and shower partons makes the most important contribution to the spectra of the associated particles at intermediate $p_T$. In $pp$ collisions the only significant contribution arises from shower-shower recombination, which is negligible in heavy-ion collisions. Moments of the associated-particle distributions are calculated to provide simple summary of the jet structures for easy comparison with experiments.Comment: 24 pages in Latex + 5 figure

Large Extra Dimension effects through Light-by-Light Scattering at the CERN LHC

Observing light-by-light scattering at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has received quite some attention and it is believed to be a clean and sensitive channel to possible new physics. In this paper, we study the diphoton production at the LHC via the process $\rm pp\rightarrow p\gamma\gamma p\rightarrow p\gamma\gamma p$ through graviton exchange in the Large Extra Dimension (LED) model. Typically, when we do the background analysis, we also study the Double Pomeron Exchange (DPE) of $\gamma\gamma$ production. We compare its production in the quark-quark collision mode to the gluon-gluon collision mode and find that contributions from the gluon-gluon collision mode are comparable to the quark-quark one. Our result shows, for extra dimension $\delta=4$, with an integrated luminosity $\rm {\cal L} = 200 fb^{-1}$ at the 14 TeV LHC, that diphoton production through graviton exchange can probe the LED effects up to the scale $\rm M_S=5.06 (4.51, 5.11) TeV$ for the forward detector acceptance $\xi_1 (\xi_2, \xi_3)$, respectively, where $0.0015<\xi_1<0.5$, $0.1<\xi_2<0.5$ and $0.0015<\xi_3<0.15$.Comment: 25 pages. 7 figs. Change some grammatical error

High-mass dimuon resonances in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV in CMS

The measurement of the charmonium ($J/\psi$, $\psi'$) and bottomonium ($\Upsilon$, $\Upsilon'$, ${\Upsilon''}$) resonances and $Z^0$ boson in nucleus-nucleus collisions provides crucial information on high density QCD matter. The observation of anomalous suppression of $J/\psi$ at the CERN-SPS and RHIC is well established but the clarification of some important questions requires equivalent studies of the $\Upsilon$ family, only possible at LHC energies. The $Z^0$ boson will be produced for the first time in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and, since its dominant production channel is through $q{\bar q}$ fusion, it is an excellent probe of the nuclear modification of quark distribution functions. This paper reports the capabilities of the CMS detector to study quarkonium and $Z^0$ production in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV, through the dimuon decay channel.Comment: 4 pages 3 figure

Probing the QCD equation of state with thermal photons in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC

Thermal photon production at mid-rapidity in Au+Au reactions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV is studied in the framework of a 2D+1 hydrodynamical model that describes efficiently the bulk identified hadron spectra at RHIC. The combined thermal plus NLO pQCD photon spectrum is in good agreement with the yields measured by the PHENIX experiment for all Au+Au centralities. Within our model, we demonstrate that the correlation of the thermal photon slopes with the charged hadron multiplicity in each centrality bin provides direct empirical information on the underlying degrees of freedom and on the equation of state, $s(T)/T^3$, of the strongly interacting matter.Comment: Version to appear in EPJ-C (extended discussion and refs. and a few corrections

Elliptic flow in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV

The angular correlations measured in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV are decomposed into contributions from back to back emission and elliptic flow. Modeling the dominant term in the correlation functions as a momentum conservation effect or as an effect of the initial transverse velocity of the source, the remaining elliptic flow component can be estimated. The elliptic flow coefficient extracted from the CMS Collaboration data is 0.04-0.08. No additional small-angle, ridge-like correlations are needed to explain the experimental data

What is Quantum? Unifying Its Micro-Physical and Structural Appearance

We can recognize two modes in which 'quantum appears' in macro domains: (i) a 'micro-physical appearance', where quantum laws are assumed to be universal and they are transferred from the micro to the macro level if suitable 'quantum coherence' conditions (e.g., very low temperatures) are realized, (ii) a 'structural appearance', where no hypothesis is made on the validity of quantum laws at a micro level, while genuine quantum aspects are detected at a structural-modeling level. In this paper, we inquire into the connections between the two appearances. We put forward the explanatory hypothesis that, 'the appearance of quantum in both cases' is due to 'the existence of a specific form of organisation, which has the capacity to cope with random perturbations that would destroy this organisation when not coped with'. We analyse how 'organisation of matter', 'organisation of life', and 'organisation of culture', play this role each in their specific domain of application, point out the importance of evolution in this respect, and put forward how our analysis sheds new light on 'what quantum is'.Comment: 10 page

High transverse momentum suppression and surface effects in Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions within the PQM model

We study parton suppression effects in heavy-ion collisions within the Parton Quenching Model (PQM). After a brief summary of the main features of the model, we present comparisons of calculations for the nuclear modification and the away-side suppression factor to data in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at 200 GeV. We discuss properties of light hadron probes and their sensitivity to the medium density within the PQM Monte Carlo framework.Comment: Comments: 6 pages, 8 figures. To appear in the proceedings of Hot Quarks 2006: Workshop for Young Scientists on the Physics of Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, Villasimius, Italy, 15-20 May 200

Emission patterns of neutral pions in 40 A MeV Ta+Au reactions

Differential cross sections of neutral pions emitted in 181Ta + 197Au collisions at a beam energy of 39.5A MeV have been measured with the photon spectrometer TAPS. The kinetic energy and transverse momentum spectra of neutral pions cannot be properly described in the framework of the thermal model, nor when the reabsorption of pions is accounted for in a phenomenological model. However, high energy and high momentum tails of the pion spectra can be well fitted through thermal distributions with unexpectedly soft temperature parameters below 10 MeV.Comment: 16 pages (double-spaced), 5 figures; corrections after referee's comments and suggestion

Constraints for the nuclear parton distributions from Z and W production at the LHC

The LHC is foreseen to finally bring also the nuclear collisions to the TeV scale thereby providing new possibilities for physics studies, in particular related to the electro-weak sector of the Standard Model. We study here the Z and W production in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC, concentrating on the prospects of testing the factorization and constraining the nuclear modifications of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Especially, we find that the rapidity asymmetries in proton-nucleus collisions, arising from the differences in the PDFs between the colliding objects, provide a decisive advantage in comparison to the rapidity-symmetric nucleus-nucleus case. We comment on how such studies will help to improve our knowledge of the nuclear PDFs.Comment: The version accepted for publication in JHEP. New figures has been added, and we also discuss the single charged lepton productio