Hard Photons and Neutral Pions from RHIC

TL;DR

This paper analyzes proton-proton and proton-nucleus data using perturbative QCD to predict hard photon and pion production in gold-gold collisions at RHIC energy, providing a theoretical framework for future experimental comparisons.

Contribution

It offers a perturbative QCD-based method to predict hard photon and pion yields at RHIC energies based on lower-energy data analysis.

Findings

Predicted photon and pion production rates at RHIC energy

Validated perturbative QCD approach with existing data

Provided parameter estimates for future experiments

Abstract

In order to fix the parameters for predictions of hard photon and pion production in $Au+Au$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV, proton-proton and proton-nucleus data are analyzed in perturbative QCD in the energy range $\sqrt{s} \approx 20-60$ GeV and a prediction at RHIC energy is given.