Abstract
A comparison of the relative yields of resonances in the decay channel in Pb-Pb and collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 2.76 TeV is performed with data collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Using muons of transverse momentum above and pseudorapidity below 2.4, the double ratio of the and excited states to the ground state in Pb-Pb and collisions, , is found to be . The probability to obtain the measured value, or lower, if the true double ratio is unity, is calculated to be less than 1%.
- Received 25 May 2011
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.052302
This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
© 2011 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration
Synopsis
Bringing nuclei together breaks quarks apart
Published 28 July 2011
The hot, dense particle soup created by colliding lead nuclei breaks up pairs of weakly bound bottom quarks, as expected if the collision creates a plasma of unbound quarks and gluons.
See more in Physics