A Detailed Study of High-pT Neutral Pion Suppression and Azimuthal Anisotropy in Au+Au Collisions at \sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV

dc.creatorPHENIX Collaboration
dc.creatorAdler, S. S.
dc.date2006-11-07
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T12:00:02Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T12:00:02Z
dc.descriptionMeasurements of neutral pion production at midrapidity in sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions as a function of transverse momentum, p_T, collision centrality, and angle with respect to reaction plane are presented. The data represent the final pi^0 results from the PHENIX experiment for the first RHIC Au+Au run at design center-of-mass-energy. They include additional data obtained using the PHENIX Level-2 trigger with more than a factor of three increase in statistics over previously published results for p_T > 6 GeV/c. We evaluate the suppression in the yield of high-p_T pi^0's relative to point-like scaling expectations using the nuclear modification factor R_AA. We present the p_T dependence of R_AA for nine bins in collision centrality. We separately integrate R_AA over larger p_T bins to show more precisely the centrality dependence of the high-p_T suppression. We then evaluate the dependence of the high-p_T suppression on the emission angle Δϕof the pions with respect to event reaction plane for 7 bins in collision centrality. We show that the yields of high-p_T pi^0's vary strongly with Δϕ, consistent with prior measurements. We show that this variation persists in the most peripheral bin accessible in this analysis. For the peripheral bins we observe no suppression for neutral pions produced aligned with the reaction plane while the yield of pi^0's produced perpendicular to the reaction plane is suppressed by more than a factor of 2. We analyze the combined centrality and Δϕdependence of the pi^0 suppression in different p_T bins using different possible descriptions of parton energy loss dependence on jet path-length averages to determine whether a single geometric picture can explain the observed suppression pattern.
dc.description330 authors, pages text, RevTeX4, figures, tables. Submitted to Physical Review C. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-ex/0611007
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-ex/0611007
dc.identifierPhys.Rev.C76:034904,2007
dc.identifierdoi:10.1103/PhysRevC.76.034904
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/206766
dc.subjectNuclear Experiment
dc.titleA Detailed Study of High-pT Neutral Pion Suppression and Azimuthal Anisotropy in Au+Au Collisions at \sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200 GeV
dc.typetext

Files

Collections