Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

DOI

10.1016/j.physletb.2009.02.037

Publication Title

Physics Letters B

Volume

673

Issue

3

Pages

183-191

Abstract

We study the beam-energy and system-size dependence of ϕ meson production (using the hadronic decay mode ϕ → K + K − ) by comparing the new results from Cu + Cu collisions and previously reported Au + Au collisions at √sNN = 62.4 and 200 GeV measured in the STAR experiment at RHIC. Data presented in this Letter are from mid-rapidity ( | y | < 0.5 ) for 0.4 < PT < 5 GeV /c . At a given beam energy, the transverse momentum distributions for ϕ mesons are observed to be similar in yield and shape for Cu + Cu and Au + Au colliding systems with similar average numbers of participating nucleons. The ϕ meson yields in nucleus–nucleus collisions, normalized by the average number of participating nucleons, are found to be enhanced relative to those from p + p collisions. The enhancement for ϕ mesons lies between strange hadrons having net strangeness =1 ( K− and Λ ¯ ) and net strangeness =2 (Ξ). The enhancement for ϕ mesons is observed to be higher at √sNN = 200 GeV compared to 62.4 GeV. These observations for the produced ϕ ( ss ¯ ) mesons clearly suggest that, at these collision energies, the source of enhancement of strange hadrons is related to the formation of a dense partonic medium in high energy nucleus–nucleus collisions and cannot be alone due to canonical suppression of their production in smaller systems.

Comments

Open access under CC BY license.

Original Publication Citation

Abelev, B. I., Aggarwal, M. M., Ahammed, Z., Anderson, B. D., Arkhipkin, D., Averichev, G. S., . . . Zuo, J. X. (2009). Energy and system size dependence of ϕ meson production in Cu + Cu and Au + Au and collisions. Physics Letters B, 673(3), 183-191. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2009.02.037

ORCID

0000-0002-5680-1814 (Bueltmann)

Download

Share

COinS