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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 14: Poster Session: Heavy Ions
HK 14.13: Poster
Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 13:30–15:30, Foyer
Centrality Dependence of Neutral Pion Production in d+Au Collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV — •Henner Büsching — Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973-5000, USA
The suppression of high pT neutral pions in central Au+Au collisions relative to the binary scaled p+p results has been one of the most significant observations at RHIC. The observed suppression may be interpreted as the effect of energy loss of the initially hard-scattered partons as they traverse the hot and dense matter produced in central Au+Au collisions. However, other theoretical studies interpret the suppression as an initial state effect, such as due to gluon saturation.
In d+Au collisions, where no hot and dense matter is produced in the final state, the hard-scattered partons propagate and fragment in QCD vacuum. Initial state effects, however, are equally present in both d+A and A+A collisions, allowing the d+Au neutral pion results to provide a baseline measurement to separate initial and final state effects.
We present the PHENIX results on the centrality dependence of the neutral pion production in d+Au collisions.