Published January 2007 | Version v1
Journal article

φ meson production in NA60

  • 1. INFN, Torino (Italy)
  • 2. Univ. di Torino (Italy)
  • 3. SUNY, Stony Brook, NY (United States)
  • 4. Univ. of Heidelberg (Germany)
  • 5. CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)
  • 6. CNRS-IN2P3, Clermont-Ferrand (France)
  • 7. LPC, Univ. Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand (France)
  • 8. CNRS-IN2P3, Palaiseau (France)
  • 9. LLR, Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau (France)
  • 10. INFN, Cagliari (Italy)
  • 11. Univ. di Cagliari (Italy)
  • 12. IST-CFTP, Lisboa (Portugal)
  • 13. CNRS-IN2P3, Lyon (France)
  • 14. IPN-Lyon, Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon-I (France)
  • 15. RIKEN, Wako, Saitama (Japan)
  • 16. CERNS-IN2P3, Palaiseau (France)
  • 17. YerPhI, Yerevan (Armenia)
  • 18. Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau (France)
  • 19. IST-CFTP, Lisbon (Portugal)
  • 20. Univ. Heidelberg (Germany)

Description

NA60 is a fixed-target experiment at the CERN SPS which measured dimuon production in nucleus-nucleus and proton-nucleus collisions. The experiment collected muon pair samples of unprecedented quality in heavy-ion experiments. This paper presents a high quality measurement of the pT distribution of the φ meson, covering a broad pT window. The data were collected in 2003 in In-In collisions at 158 GeV per nucleon. The results, presented as a function of centrality, were studied against several possible sources of systematic effects and proved to be fairly stable. We show that the inverse mT slope measured in In-In collisions, in the φ→μμ decay channel, depends significantly on the range used to perform the fit. When the fit is performed at low transverse momentum, the effective inverse slope increases from peripheral to central collisions, as measured by other experiments. We finally show that our measurement for In-In is compatible with the overall systematics of T slope versus mass, measured in different collision systems by the NA49 experiment. (orig.)

Availability note (English)

Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0111-8

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
European Physical Journal. C
Journal Volume
49
Journal Issue
1
Journal Page Range
p. 255-260
ISSN
1434-6044

Conference

Title
Hot quarks 2006. Workshop on the physics of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions
Dates
15-20 May 2006
Place
Villasimius, Sardinia (Italy)

Optional Information

Collaborations
NA60 Collaboration