Exclusive vector meson production in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Hadrons conveying strange quarks or heavy quarks are essential probes of the hot and dense medium created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. With hidden strangeness, ϕ meson production and its transport in the nuclear medium have attracted high interest since its discovery. Heavy quark-antiquark pairs, like charmonium and bottomonium mesons, are mainly produced in initial hard scattering processes of partons. While some of the produced pairs form bound quarkonia, the vast majority hadronize into particles carrying open heavy flavor. In this context, the PHENIX collaboration carries out a comprehensive physics program which studies the ϕ meson production, and heavy flavor production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. In recent years, the PHENIX experiment upgraded the detector in installing silicon vertex tracker (VTX) at mid-rapidity region and forward silicon vertex tracker (FVTX) at the forward rapidity region. With these new upgrades, the experiment has collected large data samples, and enhanced the capability of heavy flavor measurements via precision tracking. This paper summarizes the latest PHENIX results concerning ϕ meson, open and closed charm and beauty heavy quark production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. These results are presented as a function of rapidity, energy and system size, and their interpretation with respect to the current theoretical understanding.

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Measurement of the neutral and charged K* (892) mesons in the MPD experiment at NICA

EPJ Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/epjconf/201922202005 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 222 ◽

pp. 02005

Author(s):

Dmitry Ivanishchev ◽

Dmitry Kotov ◽

Evgeny Kryshen ◽

Mikhail Malaev ◽

Victor Riabov ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Heavy Ion Collisions ◽

Meson Production ◽

Feasibility Studies ◽

Heavy Ion ◽

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions ◽

Experimental Setup ◽

Parton Energy Loss ◽

Ion Collisions ◽

Systematic Uncertainties ◽

Charged Pions

Measurements of K*(892) meson production provide the means to study properties of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Because of their short lifetimes, the charged and neutral K*(892) mesons provide information about the properties of the late hadronic phase due to the presence of rescattering and regeneration effects that can modify resonance yields. The K*(892) mesons can also be used to study the various mechanisms that shape particle transverse momentum (pT) spectra, including the collective flow, in-medium parton energy loss and recombination. Measurement of neutral K*(892) mesons requires reconstruction of the charged pions and kaons originating from the primary vertex. At the same time, the measurement of charged K*(892) mesons involves reconstruction of the weakly decaying Ks mesons. Simultaneous measurement of the two particles is a way to minimize systematic uncertainties of the corresponding physical studies. We present results of feasibility studies for measurement of the charged and neutral K*(892) mesons in the MPD experimental setup in heavy-ion collisions at NICA energies. Results are obtained using full-scale Monte Carlo simulations of the experimental setup.

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