Transverse-energy production and fluctuations over centrality and acceptance in relativistic heavy-ion and nucleon-nucleon collisions: Quark versus nucleon interactions and a search for the quark-gluon plasma.

摘要

Measuring energy produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a way to investigate if a model of quark participants, or nucleon participants better describes the internal dynamics of the collision. The energy produced is proportional to the energy density in the interaction region; changes in fluctuations of energy production could be a signature for a phase transition between ordinary hadronic matter to a liberated quark-gluon plasma phase, QGP, thought to have existed one millionth of a second after the Big Bang creation of the Universe and before protons and neutrons had formed.; Three experimental nuclear physics data-analyses were conducted using the sum energy of all particles produced in the direction transverse to the beam, ET, when nuclei collide in a 2.4 mile long circular atom smasher. The nuclei are accelerated in opposite directions at 99.995% the speed of light, and center-of-mass energies available for new particle production of sNN = 62.4 GeV, and 200 GeV per colliding nucleon pair were studied. The ET was recorded by the lead-scintillator electromagnetic calorimeter detectors of the Pioneering High Energy Interactions Experiment (PHENIX), at the Relativistic heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).; The collision systems studied were 200 GeV protons with protons ( p + p), deuterons with Au ions (d+Au), and 62.4 GeV and 200 GeV gold ions with gold ions (Au+Au). The first analysis, mean ET in collision centrality, explores whether a model of nucleon participants, or quark participants, better describes energy production with collision impact. The second analysis, ET fluctuations in collision centrality, looks for non-random fluctuations in ET distributions when the density of colliding partons becomes high. The third analysis, ET fluctuations in geometric acceptance, examines fluctuations as a function of detector fiducial volume in a search for correlated energy distribution in space (correlations ), known to occur in phenomena such as elliptic flow and particle jets.; The Au+Au results are as follows. In both 62.4 GeV and 200 GeV interactions mean ET production per participant nucleon rises steadily, and per participant quark remains constant to within the identified errors. In both 62.4 GeV and 200 GeV collisions energy densities estimated for QGP formation were measured: at 200 GeV these levels of 1 GeV/fm 3, to 3 GeV/fm3 were measured in interactions of 30 and 150 participant nucleons respectively (corresponding to the 60-65%, and 25-30% centrality classes of data). In neither 62.4 GeV nor 200 GeV interactions are changes in fluctuations over collision impact observed above the 40% systematic errors introduced by the centrality definitions. Fluctuations in acceptance for the 200 GeV 0-5% most central class of collisions, corresponding to 350 participant nucleons, exhibit a 115% rise in a 6-fold increase of the transverse angle; from this a correlation-length of 3.1° is calculated; removal of known contamination effects to the fluctuations from event reaction-plane rotation and elliptic-flow are under investigation.