New technique to measure the cavity defects of Fabry-Perot interferometers

(Abridged): We define and test a new technique to accurately measure the cavity defects of air-spaced FPIs, including distortions due to the spectral tuning process typical of astronomical observations. We further develop a correction technique to maintain the shape of the cavity as constant as possible during the spectral scan. These are necessary steps to optimize the spectral transmission profile of a two-dimensional spectrograph using one or more FPIs. We devise a generalization of the techniques developed for the so-called phase-shifting interferometry to the case of FPIs. The technique is applicable to any FPI that can be tuned via changing the cavity spacing ($z$-axis), and can be used for any etalon regardless of the coating' reflectivity. The major strength of our method is the ability to fully characterize the cavity during a spectral scan, allowing for the determination of scan-dependent modifications of the plates. As a test, we have applied this technique to three 50 mm diameter interferometers, with cavity gaps ranging between 600 micron and 3 mm, coated for use in the visible range. We obtain accurate and reliable measures of the cavity defects of air-spaced FPIs, and of their evolution during the entire spectral scan. Our main, and unexpected, result is that the relative tilt between the two FPI plates varies significantly during the spectral scan, and can dominate the cavity defects; in particular, we observe that the tilt component at the extremes of the scan is sensibly larger than at the center of the scan. Exploiting the capability of the electronic controllers to set the reference plane at any given spectral step, we develop a correction technique that allows the minimization of the tilt during a complete spectral scan. The correction remains highly stable over long periods, well beyond the typical duration of astronomical observations.Comment: 15 pages, 20+ figures, accepted for publication in A&A. Two additional movies are available in the online version of the pape

Charmed Hadrons from Coalescence plus Fragmentation in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC

In a coalescence plus fragmentation approach we calculate the heavy baryon/meson ratio and the $p_T$ spectra of charmed hadrons $D^{0}$, $D_{s}$ and $\Lambda_{c}^{+}$ in a wide range of transverse momentum from low $p_T$ up to about 10 GeV and discuss their ratios from RHIC to LHC energies without any change of the coalescence parameters. We have included the contribution from decays of heavy hadron resonances and also the one due to fragmentation of heavy quarks which do not undergo the coalescence process. The coalescence process is tuned to have all charm quarks hadronizing in the $p_T\rightarrow 0$ limit and at finite $p_T$ charm quarks not undergoing coalescence are hadronized by independent fragmentation. The $p_T$ dependence of the baryon/meson ratios are found to be sensitive to the masses of coalescing quarks, in particular the $\Lambda_{c}/D^{0}$ can reach values of about $\rm 1\div 1.5$ at $p_T \approx \, 3$ \mbox{GeV}, or larger, similarly to the light baryon/meson ratio like $p/\pi$ and $\Lambda/K$, however a marked difference is a quite weak $p_T$ dependence with respect to the light case, such that a larger value at intermediate $p_T$ implies a relatively large value also for the integrated yields. A comparison with other coalescence model and with the prediction of thermal model is discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Fig. 5 updated and some minor changes in the tex

Propagation of heavy baryons in heavy-ion collisions

The drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy baryons ($\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$) in the hadronic phase created in the latter stage of the heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies have been evaluated recently. In this work we compute some experimental observables, such as the nuclear suppression factor $R_{AA}$ and the elliptic flow $v_2$ of heavy baryons at RHIC and LHC energies, highlighting the role of the hadronic phase contribution to these observables, which are going to be measured at Run 3 of LHC. For the time evolution of the heavy quarks in the QGP and heavy baryons in the hadronic phase we use the Langevin dynamics. For the hadronization of the heavy quarks to heavy baryons we employ Peterson fragmentation functions. We observe a strong suppression of both the $\Lambda_c$ and $\Lambda_b$. We find that the hadronic medium has a sizable impact on the heavy-baryon elliptic flow whereas the impact of hadronic medium rescattering is almost unnoticeable on the nuclear suppression factor. We evaluate the $\Lambda_c/D$ ratio at RHIC and LHC. We find that $\Lambda_c/D$ ratio remain unaffected due to the hadronic phase rescattering which enable it as a nobel probe of QGP phase dynamics along with its hadronization.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure