Access Type
Open Access Dissertation
Date of Award
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Physics and Astronomy
First Advisor
William Llope
Abstract
Heavy-ion collisions are used to study the properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), a hot and dense strongly-interacting system of deconfined quarks and gluons. Such systems can be formed in collisions of 197Au nuclei at the RHIC facility. Correlation and balance functions will be used to study these collisions. The correlation functions provide information on reaction mechanisms and the balance functions indicate the conditional probability that a pair of particle species was locally produced together during the collision. The correlation and balance functions of the full 3×3 matrix of (π, K, p)x(π, K, p) species pairs versus the relative rapidity, ∆y = y1 − y2, and relative azimuthal angle, ∆φ = φ1 − φ2, will be reported for 200 GeV Au+Au collisions versus the event centrality collected by the STAR experiment. Special care was taken to ensure that there were no direct correlations between the centrality definition and the correlations analysis. The correlation functions, R2, are fully-corrected for several detector effects. The balance functions, B2, are constructed from linear combinations of these fully-corrected R2 correlation functions and efficiency-corrected single particle cross-sections. Detector efficiency corrections are shown via a “closure” test to be accurate. The effects of pair cuts on either the relative momentum or the invariant mass in order to remove femtoscopy and weak decays, respectively, will be explored. The collision centrality dependence of the balance function projections is weak. The balance function integrals are also weakly dependent on the collision centrality. The experimental data is compared to several model event generators, which indicates that the hadronic cascade models (UrQMD and SMASH) more accurately reproduce the B2 integrals than does the AMPT and HIJING models.
Recommended Citation
Di Carlo, Launa, "Correlation And Balance Functions Of Identified Hadron Pairs In Au+au Collisions At Rhic" (2023). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3822.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3822