Open Charm Production and its Lepton Pair Signal in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
Abstract
Description
Open charm production at the initial and the pre-equilibrium stages in nuclear collisions is studied. The pre-equilibrium contribution to open charm production in $A+A$ collisions at $\sqrt s=200 AGeV$ is shown to be very sensitive to correlations between momenta and space-time coordinates of the minijets produced after the initial collision. A minimal correlation model based on the uncertainty principle is introduced, and leads only to a small pre-equilibrium charm yield as compared with initial yields. Opposite-sign lepton pairs $ee, eμ$ and $μμ$ from open charm decay in $p+A$ reactions at $\sqrt s=200$ AGeV are proposed as a measure of nuclear shadowing effects. Via an approximate scaling, the ratio of the spectra from $p+A$ collisions to those from $pp$ collisions is shown to reflect the shadowing function well. Finally it is shown that the required measurements are feasible at RHIC.
Ph.D thesis, ps file, 184 pages including 36 figures, LaTex files, a style file, and figure files are available via www at http://nt1.phys.columbia.edu/ZLIN/thesis.uu , or via anonymous ftp at ftp://nt1.phys.columbia.edu/pub/thesis/thesis.uu (username: ftp, password: complete email address). The two LaTex driver-files are frontpage.tex and thesis-driver.tex
Ph.D thesis, ps file, 184 pages including 36 figures, LaTex files, a style file, and figure files are available via www at http://nt1.phys.columbia.edu/ZLIN/thesis.uu , or via anonymous ftp at ftp://nt1.phys.columbia.edu/pub/thesis/thesis.uu (username: ftp, password: complete email address). The two LaTex driver-files are frontpage.tex and thesis-driver.tex