No Arabic abstract
The ATLAS detector at the LHC is capable of efficiently separating photons and neutral hadrons based on their shower shapes over a wide range in eta, phi, ET, either in addition to or instead of isolation cuts. This provides ATLAS with a unique strength for direct photon and gamma-jet physics as well as access to the unique capability to measure non-isolated photons from fragmentation or from the medium. We present a first look at the ATLAS direct photon measurement capabilities in Pb+Pb and, for reference, p+p collisions at sqrt(sNN)=5.5 TeV over the region |eta|<2.4.
The ATLAS detector is capable of resolving the highest energy pp collisions at luminosities sufficient to yield 10s of simultaneous interactions within a bunch collision lasting <0.5 nsec. Already in 2011 a mean occupancy of 20 is often found in pp running. In 2004 studies by ATLAS showed that the detector would have excellent performance also for the foreseeable particle multiplicities in the highest energy p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions that the LHC will produce. These studies resulted in a letter of intent to the LHC committee by ATLAS to do physics with these beams also. In the past 2 years of data taking, ATLAS detector performance studies have confirmed these expectations at the actual multiplicities presented below. The ATLAS program removes an artificial specialization that arose about 30 years ago in high energy physics when the energy and intensity frontier moved to colliders. Before that time, for example, the same experiment that discovered the $Upsilon$ (CFS and E605 at Fermilab) also measured the nuclear modification factor in the production of high $p_T$ identified charged hadrons using nuclear targets from Beryllium through Tungsten.
Coupled linear Boltzmann transport and hydrodynamic (CoLBT-hydro) model has been developed for simultaneous simulations of jet propagation and jet-induced medium excitation in heavy-ion collisions. Within this coupled approach, the final reconstructed jets in heavy-ion collisions include not only hadrons from the hadronization of medium modified jet shower partons from the linear Boltzmann transport (LBT) but also hadrons from the freeze-out of the jet-induced medium excitation in the hydrodynamic evolution of the bulk medium. Using the CoLBT-hydro model, we study medium modification of the fragmentation functions of $gamma$-triggered jets in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. The CoLBT-hydro model is shown to describe the experimental data not only on the suppression of leading hadrons within the jet cone at large momentum fraction $z_gamma=p_T^h/p_T^gamma$ relative to the transverse momentum of the trigger photon due to parton energy loss but also the enhancement of soft hadrons at small $z_gamma$ and $z_{rm jet}=p_T^h/p_T^{rm jet}$ due to jet-induced medium excitation. There is no suppression of the fragmentation function, however, at large momentum fraction $z_{rm jet}$ relative to the transverse momentum of the reconstructed jet due to trigger bias and medium modification of quark to gluon jet fraction. For jets whose final transverse momenta are comparable to or larger than that of the trigger photon, the trigger bias can lead to enhancement of the jet fragmentation function at large $z_{rm jet}$.
It is now well established that jet modification is a multistage effect; hence a single model alone cannot describe all facets of jet modification. The JETSCAPE framework is a multistage framework that uses several modules to simulate different stages of jet propagation through the QGP medium. These simulations require a set of parameters to ensure a smooth transition between stages. We fine tune these parameters to successfully describe a variety of observables, such as the nuclear modification factors of leading hadrons and jets, jet shape, and jet fragmentation function. Photons can be produced in the hard scattering or as radiation from quarks inside jets. In this work, we study photon-jet transverse momentum imbalance and azimuthal correlation for both $p-p$ and $Pb-Pb$ collision systems. All the photons produced in each event, including the photons from hard scattering, radiation from the parton shower, and radiation from hadronization are considered with an isolation cut to directly compare with experimental data. The simulations are conducted using the same set of tuned parameters as used for the jet analysis. No new parameters are introduced or tuned. We demonstrate a significantly improved agreement with photons from $Pb-Pb$ collisions compared to prior efforts. This work provides an independent, parameter free verification of the multistage evolution framework.
Event-by-event fluctuations of conserved charges - such as electric charge, strangeness, and baryon number - in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions provide insight into the properties of the quark-gluon plasma and the QCD phase diagram. They can be related to the higher moments of the multiplicity distributions of identified particles, such as the $Lambda$ baryon which carries both strangeness and baryon number and is thus of particular interest. We present the first measurement of net-$Lambda$ fluctuations in Pb-Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{mathrm{NN}}} = 5.02$ TeV as a function of centrality and the pseudorapidity acceptance of the measurement. The results are compared to expectations of the effects of global baryon number conservation as well as to predictions from the HIJING Monte Carlo event generator. In this analysis the Identity Method is applied in a novel way to account for the combinatoric background in the invariant mass distribution.
A novel approach, the identity method, was used for particle identification and the study of fluctuations of particle yield ratios in Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). This procedure allows to unfold the moments of the unknown multiplicity distributions of protons (p), kaons (K), pions ($pi$) and electrons (e). Using these moments the excitation function of the fluctuation measure $ u_{text{text{dyn}}}$[A,B] was measured, with A and B denoting different particle types. The obtained energy dependence of $ u_{text{dyn}}$ agrees with previously published NA49 results on the related measure $sigma_{text{dyn}}$. Moreover, $ u_{text{dyn}}$ was found to depend on the phase space coverage for [K,p] and [K,$pi$] pairs. This feature most likely explains the reported differences between measurements of NA49 and those of STAR in central Au+Au collisions.