Köln 2004 – scientific programme

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 14: Poster Session: Heavy Ions

HK 14.7: Poster

Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 13:30–15:30, Foyer

Study of Open Charm production at SPS — •Wilrid Ludolphs — Physikalisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg

Heavy ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies offer the possibility to study the behaviour of nuclear matter at high density and temperature where one expects the existence of the quark gluon plasma. The J/Ψ suppression has been studied as a possible signature, but it is only meaningful if the overall charm production rate is known.
The production of charm quarks in nuclear collisions is a hard process and should be describable in perturbative QCD. However, no measurement of open charm hadrons in nuclear collisions has been performed yet while there are indirect indications for a substantial enhancement.
The CERES collaboration therefore attempts a study of D meson production focussing on the 2-body (D⁰→ K π, 3.8%, cτ = 123.4 µm) and 3-body (D→ K π π, 9.1%, cτ = 315 µm) decay mode. The analysis is based on the reconstruction of secondary vertices using the silicon drift chambers located approximately 10 cm behind the target. An investigation will be presented on the effectiveness of various cut strategies to reduce the combinatorial background and on the resulting signal/noise ratios for D meson detection.