The PHENIX Collaboration

The ALICE Transition Radiation Detector: Construction, operation, and performance

The Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) was designed and built to enhance the capabilities of the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While aimed at providing electron identification and triggering, the TRD also contributes significantly to the track reconstruction and calibration in the central barrel of ALICE. In this paper the design, construction, operation, and performance of this detector are discussed. A pion rejection factor of up to 410 is achieved at a momentum of 1 GeV/$c$ in p-Pb collisions and the resolution at high transverse momentum improves by about 40% when including the TRD information in track reconstruction. The triggering capability is demonstrated both …

Cold-nuclear-matter effects on heavy-quark production at forward and backward rapidity in d + Au collisions at √sNN = 200  GeV.

The PHENIX experiment has measured open heavy-flavor production via semileptonic decay over the transverse momentum range 1p(T)6  GeV/c at forward and backward rapidity (1.4|y|2.0) in d+Au and p + p collisions at √sNN = 200  GeV. In central d+Au collisions, relative to the yield in p + p collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, a suppression is observed at forward rapidity (in the d-going direction) and an enhancement at backward rapidity (in the Au-going direction). Predictions using nuclear-modified-parton-distribution functions, even with additional nuclear-p(T) broadening, cannot simultaneously reproduce the data at both rapidity ranges, which implies that t…

The ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC

Journal of Instrumentation 3(08), S08002 (2008). doi:10.1088/1748-0221/3/08/S08002

Measurement of thett¯production cross section inpp¯collisions ats=1.96  TeVusing soft electronb-tagging

The authors present a measurement of the t{bar t} production cross section using events with one charged lepton and jets from p{bar p} collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. A b-tagging algorithm based on the probability of displaced tracks coming from the event interaction vertex is applied to identify b quarks from top decay. Using 318 pb{sup -1} of data collected with the CDF II detector, they measure the t{bar t} production cross section in events with at least one restrictive (tight) b-tagged jet and obtain 8.9{sub -1.0}{sup +1.0}(stat.){sub -1.0}{sup +1.1}(syst.) pb. The cross section value assumes a top quark mass of m{sub t} is presented in the paper. This result is cons…