No Arabic abstract
The RHIC high energy collision of species ranging from p+p, p(d)+A to A+A provide access to the {small-x} component of the hadron wave function. The RHIC program has brought renewed interest in that subject with its ability to reach values of the parton momentum fraction smaller than 0.01 with studies of particle production at high rapidity. Furthermore, the use of heavy nuclei in the p(d)+A collisions facilitates the study of saturation effects in the gluonic component of the nuclei because the appropriate scale for that regime grows as A^1/3. We review the experimental results of the RHIC program that have relevance to {small-x} emphasizing the physics extracted from d+Au collisions and their comparison to p+p collisions at the same energy.
The rapidity dependence of inclusive and coincident particle production in d(p)+Au collisions at RHIC can be used to probe nuclear parton distribution functions down to small momentum fractions where theory anticipates that parton saturation could be present. This paper describes how such experiments could be completed.
Recent soft physics results from collisions of ultra-relativistic nuclei at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) are reviewed. Topics discussed cover the Beam Energy Scan program with some emphasis on anisotropic particle flow.
STAR collected data in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV with transverse and longitudinal beam polarizations during the initial running periods in 2002--2004 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Results on the single transverse spin asymmetries in the production of high energy forward neutral pions and of forward charged hadrons will be presented. Data have been obtained for double longitudinal asymmetries in inclusive jet production in 2003 and 2004. These data provide sensitivity to the polarization of gluons in the proton. In the future, we aim to determine the gluon polarization over a wide kinematic range using coincidences of direct photons and jets. Furthermore, we aim to determine the polarizations of the u, bar(u), d and bar(d) quarks in the proton by measuring single longitudinal spin asymmetries in the production of weak bosons at sqrt(s) = 500$ GeV.
The energy and system size dependence of pseudorapidity ($eta$) and multiplicity distributions of photons are measured in the region -2.3 $leq$ $eta$ $leq$ -3.7 for Cu + Cu collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 and 62.4 GeV. Photon multiplicity measurements at forward rapidity have been carried out using a Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) in the STAR experiment. Photons are found to follow longitudinal scaling for Cu + Cu collisions for 0-10% centrality. A Comparison of pseudorapidity distributions with HIIJING model is also presented.
Charmonium suppression in hot and dense nuclear matter has been argued to be a signature for the production of the quark gluon plasma (QGP). In order to search for this effect in heavy ion collisions one must have a clear understanding of all the factors that can contribute to such a suppression. These may include shadowing of the partons in a nuclear environment, breakup of a correlated $c-bar{c}$ pair as it traverses the nuclear fragment, suppression of feed-down from higher mass states as well as other initial state interactions. In order to disentangle these effects one must measure charmonium production rates in both proton+proton (p+p) and proton+nucleus (p+A) collisions. The p+p collisions serve as a baseline for searching for suppression compared to binary scaling predictions, allow one to quantify the amount of feed-down from higher states as well as serve as a tool to distinguish between different theoretical calculations for charmonium production mechanisms. In order to quantify nuclear effects it is also necessary to study charmonium production in p+A collisions where the temperature and density of the system are low compared to a heavy ion collision. These measurements allow one to determine the influence of nuclear shadowing and breakup in cold nuclear matter which can be extrapolated to heavy ion collisions in order to determine the amount anomalous suppression. Of course, extrapolations that rely on a model based technique depend heavily on the assumption of a production mechanism, a fact that reinforces the importance of the p+p measurements...