Kaon and open charm production in central lead-lead collisions at the CERN SPS

Abstract

This thesis describes the experimental study of hadronic systems with a very high energy density and temperature. From theoretical caluclations it is expected that hadronic matter undergoes a phase transition to a deconfined state at an energy density of about 1 GeV/fm^3 or a temperature of 170 MeV. The goal of the experiments is to observe the phase transition and study the properties of the deconfined state, the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Two different measurements are described and the results are discussed. The first measurement concerns the momentum distributions and total yields of kaons in lead-lead collisions at 40, 80 and 158 AGeV beam energy. Kaons are the most abundant carrier of the relatively heavy strange quarks and their production is expected to be sensitive to the energy density and the state of matter early in the collision. The second measurement is a search for the production of mesons which carry the even heavier charm quark, at the highest beam energy. The measurements have been performed with the NA49 detector at the SPS accelerator at CERN. The main detector elements are four Time Projection Chambers (TPCs), which record the trajectories of a large fraction of the final state particles to determine the charge and the momentum of each particle. In addition, the measurement of the ionisation energy loss dE/dx in the TPCs allows to identify pions, kaons and protons. Additional detectors provide a measurement of the time-of-flight in a limited acceptance. Combining the time-of-flight and dE/dx measurements greatly improves the separation of the different particle species. The kaon momentum distributions as presented in this thesis have been determined using the dE/dx measurement in the TPCs. The time-of-flight information is used for a detailed study of the peak shape of the dE/dx measurement. The resulting kaon spectra and total yields provide strong indications that interactions between produced particles or even thermalisation play an important role in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The measured kaon yields are compared to two different models which are based on purely hadronic processes, not taking into account the possible phase transition to the QGP. The hadron-transport model RQMD takes into account collisions between produced particles, and the Hadron Gas Model assumes thermalisation. Both models are in reasonable agreement with the data. A model which does assume the phase transition, the Statistical Model of the Early Stage (SMES), shows even better agreement with the data. It predicts a sharp maximum in the strangeness to pion ratio between 10 AGeV, the highest beam energy of earlier experiments, and 40 AGeV, the lowest beam energy used in this thesis. The present data are consistent with this prediction, but future measurements at 20 and 30 AGeV will decide whether the sharp maximum is indeed observed. If indeed an equilibrium QGP is formed at the highest SPS energies, as is expected within the SMES, this would also lead to a relatively large production of charm quarks and hence open charm mesons. Therefore, a large sample of three million lead-lead events at 158 AGeV was taken to search for open charm production. No signal has been observed in the analysis, implying that the charm yield is lower than the expected yield in an equilibrium QGP. It is concluded that if a QGP is formed in the collisions, it does not live long enough or has too low a temperature to allow the charm production to reach equilibrium