Abstract
The PHENIX collaboration presents first measurements of low-momentum (0.4<pT<3 GeV/c) direct-photon yields from Au+Au collisions at sNN=39 and 62.4 GeV. For both beam energies the direct-photon yields are substantially enhanced with respect to expectations from prompt processes, similar to the yields observed in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200. Analyzing the photon yield as a function of the experimental observable dNch/dη reveals that the low-momentum (>1 GeV/c) direct-photon yield dNγdir/dη is a smooth function of dNch/dη and can be well described as proportional to (dNch/dη)α with α≈1.25. This scaling behavior holds for a wide range of beam energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider, for centrality selected samples, as well as for different A+A collision systems. At a given beam energy, the scaling also holds for high pT (>5 GeV/c), but when results from different collision energies are compared, an additional sNN-dependent multiplicative factor is needed to describe the integrated-direct-photon yield.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 022301 |
| Journal | Physical Review Letters |
| Volume | 123 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 10 2019 |
Funding
We thank the staff of the Collider-Accelerator and Physics Departments at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the staff of the other PHENIX participating institutions for their vital contributions. We acknowledge support from the Office of Nuclear Physics in the Office of Science of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Abilene Christian University Research Council, Research Foundation of SUNY, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Vanderbilt University (U.S.A), Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), Natural Science Foundation of China (People’s Republic of China), Croatian Science Foundation and Ministry of Science and Education (Croatia), Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (Czech Republic), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, and Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (France), Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Germany), J. Bolyai Research Scholarship, EFOP, the New National Excellence Program (ÚNKP), NKFIH, and OTKA (Hungary), Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology (India), Israel Science Foundation (Israel), Basic Science Research Program through NRF of the Ministry of Education (Korea), Physics Department, Lahore University of Management Sciences (Pakistan), Ministry of Education and Science, Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Agency of Atomic Energy (Russia), VR and Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden), the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union, the Hungarian American Enterprise Scholarship Fund, the US-Hungarian Fulbright Foundation, and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation.