2010/09/22 by Sören Schlichting, Soeren Schlichting, Scott Pratt · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Charge (physics) #Charge conservation #Collider #Heavy ion #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ion #Nuclear physics #Observable #Parity (physics) #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.83.014913
published as Phys.Rev.C83:014913,2011 · 11 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2010/09/22 · openalex publication_date 2011/01/31 · arxiv updated 2011/02/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Relativistic heavy ion collisions provide laboratory environments from which one can study the creation of a novel state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma. The existence of such a state is postulated to alter the mechanism and evolution of charge production, which then becomes manifest in charge correlations. We study the separation of balancing charges at kinetic freeze-out by analyzing recent results on balancing charge correlations for Au + Au collisions at √sNN=200 GeV. We find that in central collisions, the spatial points from which balancing charges are emitted are characterized by smaller relative angles. These results are consistent with the expectation that charge production occurred later in the collision, as would be expected for delayed hadronization. An alternative explanation would be that the charges were produced early, perhaps with a different mechanism where the charge production mechanism was altered from string breaking which tends to separate the charges in relative rapidity. The alternative explanation would also rely on the diffusion of charges being small. In addition we calculate the contributions from charge-balance correlations to STAR's local parity violation observable. We find that local charge conservation, when combined with elliptic flow, explains the bulk of STAR's measurement.