Direct photons measured by the PHENIX experiment at RHIC

Results from the PHENIX experiment at RHIC on direct photon production in p+p, d+Au, and Au+Au collisions at  =200 GeV are presented. In p+p collisions, direct photon production at high pT behaves as expected from perturbative QCD calculations. The p+p measurement serves as a baseline for direct pho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 225 - 229
Main Author Bathe, S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Heidelberg Springer Nature B.V 01.01.2007
Subjects
Collisions
Energy dissipation
Hadrons
Nuclear matter
Particle production
Partons
Photons
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
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Summary:Results from the PHENIX experiment at RHIC on direct photon production in p+p, d+Au, and Au+Au collisions at  =200 GeV are presented. In p+p collisions, direct photon production at high pT behaves as expected from perturbative QCD calculations. The p+p measurement serves as a baseline for direct photon production in Au+Au collisions. In d+Au collisions, no effects of cold nuclear matter are found within the large uncertainty of the measurement. In Au+Au collisions, the production of high pT direct photons scales as expected for particle production in hard scatterings. This supports jet quenching models, which attribute the suppression of high pT hadrons to the energy loss of fast partons in the medium produced in the collision. Low pT direct photons, measured via e+e- pairs with small invariant mass, are possibly related to the production of thermal direct photons.
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052
DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0084-7