0000000000330707
AUTHOR
S. Gavin
How To Find Charm in Nuclear Collisions at RHIC and LHC
Measurements of dilepton production from charm decay and Drell-Yan processes respectively probe the gluon and sea quark distributions in hadronic collisions. In nucleus-nucleus collisions, these hard scattering processes constitute a `background' to thermal contributions from the hot matter produced by the collision. To determine the magnitude and behavior of this background, we calculate the hard scattering contribution to dilepton production in nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC at next to leading order in perturbative QCD. Invariant mass, rapidity and transverse momentum distributions are presented. We compare these results to optimistic hydrodynamic estimates of the thermal dilepton pro…
Low-pT pion enhancement from partial thermalization in nuclear collisions
Abstract We attribute the enhancement of pions measured at low transverse momenta and central rapidities in 200 A GeV nucleus-nucleus collisions to the partial thermal equilibration of a superdense pion fluid. Transport theory calculations are compared to recent S+S and O+Au data, and predictions are made for Pb+Pb.