Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Hemmick, Thomas K, Drees, Axel | Zahed,
Date
2012-08-01
Keywords
beauty, bottom, charm, dielectron, phenix, rhic | Nuclear physics--Particle physics
Department
Department of Physics
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/71286
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was built to produce and study the extremely hot and dense phase of matter called Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) in which the degrees of freedom are individual partons rather than composite hadrons. Since 2000, RHIC has collided various species of particles in order to disentangle and isolate the properties of the strongly interacting QGP: p+p to set a baseline, d+Au to establish a control experiment, Au+Au to definitively create the QGP, and Cu+Cu to bridge the gap between d+Au and Au+Au. Electron-positron pairs are a particularly effective probe of the QGP because they carry no color charge. Therefore, once created, these leptons do not interact strongly with the medium. As a result, they retain characteristics of the full time evolution and dynamics of the system. There are many features of interest in the dielectron invariant mass spectrum. The low mass region (m<1 GeV/c2) consists primarily of pairs from Dalitz decays of light hadrons and direct decays of vector mesons that can be modified by the medium, while the intermediate (1
Recommended Citation
Kamin, Jason, "A Search for Charm and Beauty in a Very Strange
World" (2012). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 492.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/492