Abstract
The PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has performed a systematic study of and meson production at midrapidity in , and collisions at GeV. The and mesons are reconstructed via their and decay modes, respectively. The measured transverse-momentum spectra are used to determine the nuclear modification factor of and mesons in and collisions at different centralities. In the collisions, the nuclear modification factor of and mesons is almost constant as a function of transverse momentum and is consistent with unity, showing that cold-nuclear-matter effects do not play a significant role in the measured kinematic range. In collisions, within the uncertainties no nuclear modification is registered in peripheral collisions. In central collisions, both mesons show suppression relative to the expectations from the yield scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions in the system. In the range , the strange mesons similarly to the meson with hidden strangeness, show an intermediate suppression between the more suppressed light quark mesons and the nonsuppressed baryons . At higher transverse momentum, , production of all particles is similarly suppressed by a factor of .
7 More- Received 23 May 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.90.054905
©2014 American Physical Society