The production of eta mesons has been measured in the proton-proton interaction close to the reaction threshold using the COSY-11 internal facility at the cooler synchrotron COSY. Total cross sections were determined for eight different excess energies in the range from 0.5 MeV to 5.4 MeV. The energy dependence of the total cross section is well described by the available phase-space volume weighted by FSI factors for the proton-proton and proton-eta pairs.
Threshold measurements of the associated strangeness production reactions pp --> p K(+) Lambda and pp --> p K(+) Sigma(0) are presented. Although slight differences in the shapes of the excitation functions are observed, the most remarkable feature of the data is that at the same excess energy the total cross section for the Sigma(0) production appears to be about a factor of 28 smaller than the one for the Lambda particle. It is concluded that strong Sigma(0)-p final state interactions, and in particular the Sigma-N --> Lambda-p conversion reaction, are the likely cause of the depletion for the yield in the Sigma signal. This hypothesis is in line with other experimental evidence in the literature.
We present the centrality dependent measurement of multiplicity and pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles and photons in Au + Au collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 62.4 GeV. The charged particles and photons are measured in the pseudorapidity region 2.9 < eta < 3.9 and 2.3 < eta < 3.7, respectively. We have studied the scaling of particle production with the number of participating nucleons and the number of binary collisions. The photon and charged particle production in the measured pseudorapidity range has been shown to be consistent with energy independent limiting fragmentation behavior. The photons are observed to follow a centrality independent limiting fragmentation behavior while for the charged particles it is centrality dependent. We have carried out a comparative study of the pseudorapidity distributions of positively charged hadrons, negatively charged hadrons, photons, pions, net protons in nucleus--nucleus collisions and pseudorapidity distributions from p+p collisions. From these comparisons we conclude that baryons in the inclusive charged particle distribution are responsible for the observed centrality dependence of limiting fragmentation. The mesons are found to follow an energy independent behavior of limiting fragmentation while the behavior of baryons seems to be energy dependent.
A comprehensive survey of event-by-event fluctuations of charged hadron multiplicity in relativistic heavy ions is presented. The survey covers Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 62.4 and 200 GeV, and Cu+Cu collisions sqrt(s_NN) = 22.5, 62.4, and 200 GeV. Fluctuations are measured as a function of collision centrality, transverse momentum range, and charge sign. After correcting for non-dynamical fluctuations due to fluctuations in the collision geometry within a centrality bin, the remaining dynamical fluctuations expressed as the variance normalized by the mean tend to decrease with increasing centrality. The dynamical fluctuations are consistent with or below the expectation from a superposition of participant nucleon-nucleon collisions based upon p+p data, indicating that this dataset does not exhibit evidence of critical behavior in terms of the compressibility of the system. An analysis of Negative Binomial Distribution fits to the multiplicity distributions demonstrates that the heavy ion data exhibit weak clustering properties.
The PHENIX experiment at RHIC has measured transverse energy and charged particle multiplicity at mid-rapidity in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 19.6, 130 and 200 GeV as a function of centrality. The presented results are compared to measurements from other RHIC experiments, and experiments at lower energies. The sqrt(s_NN) dependence of dE_T/deta and dN_ch/deta per pair of participants is consistent with logarithmic scaling for the most central events. The centrality dependence of dE_T/deta and dN_ch/deta is similar at all measured incident energies. At RHIC energies the ratio of transverse energy per charged particle was found independent of centrality and growing slowly with sqrt(s_NN). A survey of comparisons between the data and available theoretical models is also presented.
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