The PHOBOS perspective on discoveries at RHIC
Oct, 2004Citations per year
Abstract:
This paper describes the conclusions that can be drawn from the data taken thus far with the PHOBOS detector at RHIC. In the most central Au+Au collisions at the highest beam energy, evidence is found for the formation of a very high energy density system whose description in terms of simple hadronic degrees of freedom is inappropriate. Furthermore, the constituents of this novel system are found to undergo a significant level of interaction. The properties of particle production at RHIC energies are shown to follow a number of simple scaling behaviors, some of which continue trends found at lower energies or in simpler systems. As a function of centrality, the total number of charged particles scales with the number of participating nucleons. When comparing Au+Au at different centralities, the dependence of the yield on the number of participants at higher pT (~4 GeV/c) is very similar to that at low transverse momentum. The measured values of charged particle pseudorapidity density and elliptic flow were found to be independent of energy over a broad range of pseudorapidities when effectively viewed in the rest frame of one of the colliding nuclei, a property we describe as extended longitudinal scaling''. Finally, the centrality and energy dependences of several observables were found to factorize to a surprising degree.Note:
- PHOBOS White Paper on discoveries at RHIC •
- PHOBOS White Paper on discoveries at RHIC: 93 pages, 44 figures: revised with improvements in wording, no changes to content or conclusions
- 13.85.Hd
- 25.75.-q
- Relativistic heavy ion collision data
- PHOBOS experiment at RHIC
- Scaling in multiparticle production
- Energy density in collisions of ultrarelativistic nuclei
- Quark-gluon plasma
- Quark–gluon plasma
- review
- p nucleus: nuclear reaction
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