Various pion and photon production mechanisms in high-energy nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC are discussed. Comparison with RHIC data is done whenever possible. The prospect of using electromagnetic probes to characterize quark-gluon plasma formation is assessed.
The production of light (anti-)(hyper-)nuclei in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC is considered in the framework of the Saha equation, making use of the analogy between the evolution of the early universe after the Big Bang and that of Little Bangs created in the lab. Assuming that disintegration and regeneration reactions involving light nuclei proceed in relative chemical equilibrium after the chemical freeze-out of hadrons, their abundances are determined through the famous cosmological Saha equation of primordial nucleosynthesis and show no exponential dependence on the temperature typical for the thermal model. A quantitative analysis, performed using the hadron resonance gas model in partial chemical equilibrium, shows agreement with experimental data of the ALICE collaboration on d, $^3$He, $^3_Lambda$H, and $^4$He yields for a very broad range of temperatures at $T lesssim 155$ MeV. The presented picture is supported by the observed suppression of resonance yields in central Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC.
We investigate the measurement of Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) photon correlations as an experimental tool to discriminate different sources of photon enhancement, which are proposed to simultaneously reproduce the direct photon yield and the azimuthal anisotropy measured in nuclear collisions at RHIC and the LHC. To showcase this, we consider two different scenarios in which we enhance the yields from standard hydrodynamical simulations. In the first, additional photons are produced from the early pre-equilibrium stage computed from the textit{bottom-up} thermalization scenario. In the second, the thermal rates are enhanced close to the pseudo-critical temperature $T_capprox 155,text{MeV}$ using a phenomenological ansatz. We compute the correlators for relative momenta $q_o, ,q_s$ and $q_l$ for different transverse pair momenta, $K_perp$, and find that the longitudinal correlation is the most sensitive to different photon sources. Our results also demonstrate that including anisotropic pre-equilibrium rates enhances non-Gaussianities in the correlators, which can be quantified using the kurtosis of the correlators. Finally, we study the feasibility of measuring a direct photon HBT signal in the upcoming high-luminosity LHC runs. Considering only statistical uncertainties, we find that with the projected $sim 10^{10}$ heavy ion events a measurement of the HBT correlations for $K_perp<1, text{GeV}$ is statistically significant.
This writeup is a compilation of the predictions for the forthcoming Heavy Ion Program at the Large Hadron Collider, as presented at the CERN Theory Institute Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC - Last Call for Predictions, held from May 14th to June 10th 2007.
The experimental data from the RHIC and LHC experiments of invariant pT spectra in A+A and p + p collisions are analysed with Tsallis distributions in different approaches. The information about the freeze-out surface in terms of freeze-out volume, temperature, chemical potential and radial flow velocity for different particle species are obtained. Further, these parameters are studied as a function of the mass of the secondary particles. A mass-dependent differential freeze-out is observed which does not seem to distinguish between particles and their antiparticles. Further a mass-hierarchy in the radial flow is observed, meaning heavier particles suffer lower radial flow. Tsallis distribution function at finite chemical potential is used to study the mass dependence of chemical potential. The peripheral heavy-ion and proton-proton collisions at the same energies seem to be equivalent in terms of the extracted thermodynamic parameters.
The three-dimensional pion and kaon emission source functions are extracted from the HKM model simulations of the central Au+Au collisions at the top RHIC energy $sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV. The model describes well the experimental data, previously obtained by the PHENIX and STAR collaborations using the imaging technique. In particular, the HKM reproduces the non-Gaussian heavy tails of the source function in the pair transverse momentum (out) and beam (long) directions, observed in the pion case and practically absent for kaons. The role of the rescatterings and long-lived resonances decays in forming of the mentioned long range tails is investigated. The particle rescatterings contribution to the out tail seems to be dominating. The model calculations also show the substantial relative emission times between pions (with mean value 14.5 fm/c in LCMS), including those coming from resonance decays and rescatterings. The prediction is made for the source functions in the LHC Pb+Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV, which are still not extracted from the measured correlation functions.