How strange is PHOBOS? First RHIC physics results and future prospects

Le résumé fourni par la source

The early summer of 2000 saw the start of the RHIC experimental programme. The PHOBOS collaboration used data from the beginning of the running period to extract the first physics information about this exciting new regime. This first measurement consisted of pseudorapidity densities of primary charged particles near mid-rapidity in central Au + Au collisions at beam energies which gave centre-of-mass energies per pair of colliding nucleons of √snn = 56 and 130 GeV. The observed densities are higher than those observed previously in any collisions in the laboratory. In addition, the rate of increase in density between the two energies is significantly larger than that for nucleon-nucleon collisions at comparable beam energies. This paper will briefly describe the PHOBOS experiment (including the subset of the full detector installed for the early period of the RHIC beam), discuss the results of the first physics measurement and conclude with the prospects for the future, especially in the area of strangeness production.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.