Systematic studies of the centrality dependence of soft photon production in Au + Au collision with PHENIX

Bannier, B. and Adare, A. and Afanasiev, S. and Aidala, C. and Ajitanand, N. N. and Akiba, Y. and Akimoto, R. and Al-Bataineh, H. and Al-Ta'ani, H. and Alexander, J. and Alfred, M. and Andrews, K. R. and Angerami, A. and Aoki, K. and Apadula, N. and Aphecetche, L. and Appelt, E. and Aramaki, Y. and Armendariz, R. and Aronson, S. H. and Asai, J. and Asano, H. and Aschenauer, E. C. and Atomssa, E. T. and Averbeck, R. and Awes, T. C. and Azmoun, B. and Babintsev, V. and Bai, M. and Bai, X. and Csanád, Máté and Csörgő, Tamás and Imrek, József and Kiss, Árpád and Varga-Kőfaragó, Mónika and Nagy, Márton and Ster, András and Sziklai, János István and Tarján, Péter and Vargyas, Márton and Vértesi, Róbert and Zimányi, József (2014) Systematic studies of the centrality dependence of soft photon production in Au + Au collision with PHENIX. NUCLEAR PHYSICS A, 931. pp. 1189-1193. ISSN 0375-9474

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Abstract

Since the earliest days of Heavy Ion Physics thermal soft photon radiation emitted during the reaction had been theorized as a smoking gun signal for formation of a quark-gluon plasma and as a tool to characterize its properties. In recent years the existence of excess photon radiation in heavy ion collisions over the expectation from initial hard interactions has been confirmed at both RHIC and LHC energies by PHENIX and ALICE respectively. There the radiation has been found to exhibit elliptic flow v2 well above what can currently be reconciled with a picture of early emission from a plasma phase. During the 2007 and 2010 Au+Au runs PHENIX has measured a high purity sample of soft photons down to pT > 0.4 GeV/c using an external conversion method. We present recent systematic studies by PHENIX from that sample on the centrality dependence of the soft photon yield, and elliptic and triangular flow v2 and v3 in Au+Au collisions which fill in the experimental picture and enable discrimination of competing soft photon production scenarios.

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