Charged hadron transverse momentum distributions in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the transverse momentum distributions of charged hadrons in gold-gold collisions at 200 GeV, revealing how spectral shapes evolve with collision centrality and indicating that high-p_T yields scale with participating nucleons.

Contribution

It provides detailed measurements of charged hadron spectra across different collision centralities at RHIC energies, highlighting the scaling behavior of high-p_T yields with participating nucleons.

Findings

Spectral shape changes between proton-antiproton and peripheral Au+Au collisions.

High-p_T yields scale with the number of participating nucleons.

Significant evolution of spectra from peripheral to central collisions.

Abstract

We present transverse momentum distributions of charged hadrons produced in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV. The evolution of the spectra for transverse momenta p_T from 0.25 to 5GeV/c is studied as a function of collision centrality over a range from 65 to 344 participating nucleons. We find a significant change of the spectral shape between proton-antiproton and peripheral Au+Au collisions. Comparing peripheral to central Au+Au collisions, we find that the yields at the highest p_T exhibit approximate scaling with the number of participating nucleons, rather than scaling with the number of binary collisions.