次级粒子精选.pdfVIP

Nuclear Physics A 774 (2006) 113–128 New results from the PHOBOS experiment G. Rolanda (for the PHOBOS∗ Collaboration) aMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA Over the past five years, PHOBOS has collected data on p+p, d+Au, Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions, covering a wide range of collision energy, collision centrality and system size. Using these data, we have identified scaling features that are common for all types of high-energy collisions, as well as collective effects that are unique to the conditions created in collisions of relativistic nuclei. In this paper, we will focus on recent results obtained for collisions of Cu nuclei. Both in terms of universal features of particle production, and in the development of truly collective effects, the results for Cu nuclei confirm and extend our present understanding of nuclear collisions at the highest energies. In addition, we will describe recent unique results on multiplicity fluctuations and particle production at very low transverse momenta. 1. OVERVIEW PHOBOS is one of four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab, studying collisions of heavy nuclei at energies up to √sNN = 200 GeV. Our goal is to study the properties of strongly interacting matter at extreme temperature and density, where ab initio numerical QCD calculations predict a phase transition to a system dominated by quark and gluon degrees of freedom. Our findings from the first four years of these studies have been summarized in [1]. There we argued that in Au+Au collisions, a dense, highly interacting system is created, with energy densities far in excess of the critical values for the QCD phase transition. 2. THE PHOBOS EXPERIMENT A detailed description of the PHOBOS