Journal
PHYSICS LETTERS B
Volume 673, Issue 3, Pages 183-191Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2009.02.037
Keywords
Particle production; Strangeness enhancement; Canonical suppression; Quark-gluon plasma; Resonances
Funding
- Offices of NP and HEP
- US NSF
- Sloan Foundation
- DFG Excellence Cluster EXC153 of Germany
- CNRS/IN2P3
- RA
- RPL
- EMN of France
- STFC and EPSRC of the United Kingdom
- FAPESP of Brazil
- Russian Ministry of Sci. and Tech.
- NNSFC of China
- CAS of China
- MoST of China
- MoE of China
- IRP and GA of the Czech Republic
- FOM of the Netherlands
- DAE of the Government of India
- DST of the Government of India
- CSIR of the Government of India
- Swiss NSF
- Polish State Committee for Scientific Research
- Korea Sci. & Eng. Foundation
- STFC [PP/F001061/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [PP/F001061/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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We study the beam-energy and system-size dependence of phi meson production (using the hadronic decay mode phi -> K+ K-) by comparing the new results from Cu + Cu collisions and previously reported Au + Au collisions at root s(NN) = 62.4 and 200 GeV measured in the STAR experiment at RHIC. Data presented in this Letter are from mid-rapidity (vertical bar y vertical bar < 0.5) for 0.4 < p(T) < 5 GeV/c. At a given beam energy, the transverse momentum distributions for phi 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 phi 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 phi mesons lies between strange hadrons having net strangeness = 1 (K- and <(A)over bar>) and net strangeness = 2 (Xi). The enhancement for phi mesons is observed to be higher at root s(NN) = 200 GeV compared to 62.4 GeV. These observations for the produced phi(s (s) over bar) 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. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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