Perspective for resonances in p-p collisions with the ALICE detector

TL;DR

This paper evaluates ALICE detector's ability to reconstruct short-lived resonances in early LHC p-p collisions, demonstrating successful identification of rho and phi resonances under simulated conditions.

Contribution

It presents a detailed simulation study showing ALICE's potential to detect resonances in initial p-p collision data without particle ID.

Findings

Reliable rho(770) yield estimation at 900 GeV

Phi resonance signal can be extracted at 10 TeV

Phi signal visible in high-multiplicity events

Abstract

The capability of the ALICE detector to reconstruct short-lived resonances from the very beginning of the LHC p-p program start-up was investigated, considering about 300,000 minimum bias p-p PYTHIA events at 900 GeV and 10 TeV, fully reconstructed under the hypothesis of a still misaligned detector. Only the information from track reconstruction was taken into account and no PID knowledge was considered. A reliable rho(770) yield estimation was possible in 900 GeV events. Moreover, in 300,000 p-p events at 10 TeV the signal for the phi-resonance could be extracted. A significance of 9 can be reached if only resonances with a transverse momentum larger than 1.5 GeV/c are considered. Moreover, even with this low statistics the phi signal is visible in events with a multiplicity as high as 100.