No Arabic abstract
We present a systematic theoretical analysis of the ALICE measurement of low-$p_T$ direct-photon production in central lead-lead collisions at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of $sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV. Using next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD, we compute the relative contributions to prompt-photon production from different initial and final states and the theoretical uncertainties coming from independent variations of the renormalisation and factorisation scales, the nuclear parton densities and the fragmentation functions. Based on different fits to the unsubtracted and prompt-photon subtracted ALICE data, we consistently find an exponential, possibly thermal, photon spectrum from the quark-gluon plasma (or hot medium) with slope $T=304pm 58$ MeV and $309pm64$ MeV at $p_Tin[0.8;2.2]$ GeV and $p_Tin[1.5;3.5]$ GeV as well as a power-law ($p_T^{-4}$) behavior for $p_T>4$ GeV as predicted by QCD hard scattering.
Prompt photons are a powerful tool to study heavy ion collisions. Their production rates provide access to the initial state parton distribution functions and also provide a means to calibrate the expected energy of jets that are produced in the medium. The ATLAS detector measures photons with its hermetic, longitudinally segmented calorimeter, which gives excellent spatial and energy resolutions, and detailed information about the shower shape of each measured photon. This provides significant rejection against the expected background from the decays of neutral pions in jets. Rejection against jet fragmentation products is further enhanced by requiring candidate photons to be isolated. First results on the spectra of isolated prompt photons from a dataset with an integrated luminosity of approximately 0.13 nb^-1 of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=2.76 TeV are shown as a function of transverse momentum and centrality. The measured spectra are compared to expectations from perturbative QCD calculations.
If the fundamental planck scale is near a TeV, then parton collisions with high enough center-of-mass energy should produce black holes. The production rate for such black holes at LHC has been extensively studied for the case of a proton-proton collision. In this paper, we extend this analysis to a lead-lead collision at LHC. We find that the cross section for small black holes which may in principle be produced in such a collision is either enhanced or suppressed, depending upon the black hole mass. For example, for black holes with a mass around 3 TeV we find that the differential black hole production cross section, dsigma/dM, in a typical lead-lead collision is up to 90 times larger than that for black holes produced in a typical proton-proton collision. We also discuss the cross-sections for `string ball production in these collisions. For string balls of mass about 1 (2) TeV, we find that the differential production cross section in a typical lead-lead collision may be enhanced by a factor up to 3300 (850) times that of a proton-proton collision at LHC.
We provide a comprehensive comparison of W/Z vector boson production data in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC with predictions obtained using the nCTEQ15 PDFs. We identify the measurements which have the largest potential impact on the PDFs, and estimate the effect of including these data using a Monte Carlo reweighting method. We find this data set can provide information about both the nuclear corrections and the heavy flavor (strange) PDF components. As the proton flavor determination is dependent on nuclear corrections (from heavy target DIS, for example), this information can also help improve the proton PDFs.
We point out that dissociation of J/Psi by partons (mostly gluons) present in the intermediate stage of heavy-ion collisions can explain J/Psi suppression observed recently by the NA-50 Collaboration at the CERN-SPS in Pb-Pb interactions. Suppression by intermediate stage gluons represents an additional multiplicative factor to that given by Gerschel-Hufner mechanism. The agreement with data on J/Psi suppression both in light- ions induced nuclear collisions and in Pb-Pb interactions requires that the life-time of intermediate gluons increases with nucleon numbers of colliding nuclei. In our model the energy density of intermediate stage gluons in Pb-Pb collisions approaches for a short time the critical density.
We compare predictions of nCTEQ15 nuclear parton distribution functions with proton-lead vector boson production data from the LHC. We select data sets that are most sensitive to nuclear PDFs and have potential to constrain them. We identify the kinematic regions and flavours where these data can bring new information and will have largest impact on the nuclear PDFs. Finally, we estimate the effect of including these data in a global analysis using a reweighting method.