Open Access

Betty Abelev, Madan Mohan Aggarwal, Zubayer Ahammed, Bryon D. Anderson, Dmitry A. Arkhipkin, Georgy S. Averichev, Y. Bai, Jan Balewski, Olga Barannikova, Lee Stuart Barnby, Jérome Baudot, S. Baumgart, D.R. Beavis, Rene Bellwied, F. Benedosso, M.J. Betancourt, R.R. Betts, Somnath Bharadwaj, Anju Bhasin, Ashok Kumar Bhati, Hans Bichsel, Jaroslav Bielčík, Jana Bielčíková, B. Biritz, Leslie C. Bland, Marek Bombara, B.E. Bonner, Michiel Botje, J. Bouchet, E. Braidot, Andrei V. Brandin, Elena Bruna, S. Bueltmann, T.P. Burton, M. Bystersky, X.Z. Cai, Helen Louise Caines, Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, J. Callner, O. Catu, Daniel A. Cebra, R. Cendejas, M.C. Cervantes, Z. Chajecki, Petr Chaloupka, S. Chattopadhyay, H.F. Chen, J.H. Chen, J.Y. Chen, J. Cheng, Michael Gerard Cherney, Alexei Chikanian, K.E. Choi, William Christie, Suh-Urk Chung, R.F. Clarke, M.J. Codrington, Jean Pierre Coffin, R. Corliss, Thomas Michael Cormier, Mauro Rogerio Cosentino, John G. Cramer, Henry J. Crawford, Debasish Das, Sadhana Dash, M. Daugherity, C. De Silva, Tatiana G. Dedovič, M. DePhillips, Anatoly A. Derevschikov, Rafael Derradi de Souza, Lidia Didenko, P. Djawotho, Sunil Manohar Dogra, X. Dong, James Lucus Drachenberg, James E. Draper, F. Du, James C. Dunlop, M.R. Dutta Mazumdar, W.R. Edwards, Leonid G. Efimov, E. Elhalhuli, M. Elnimr, V. Emelianov, Jon M. Engelage, Geary Wareham Eppley, Barbara Ewa Erazmus, Magali Danielle Estienne, L. Eun, Patricia Fachini, Renee H. Fatemi, Jan Fedorišin, A. Feng, Peter Filip, Evan Finch, Valeri Fine, Yuri V. Fisyak, Carl A. Gagliardi, L. Gaillard, Dhevan Raja Gangadharan, Murthy S. Ganti, Edmundo Javier Garcia-Solis, Vahe Ghazikhanian, Premomoy Ghosh, Y.N. Gorbunov, A. Gordon, Oleksandr Grebenyuk, David P. Grosnick, B. Grube, Steven M. Guertin, K.S.F.F. Guimaraes, Anik Gupta, N. Gupta, Włodzimierz Guryn, B. Haag, Timothy J. Hallman, Ahmed M. Hamed, John W. Harris, W. He, Mark Thomas Heinz, S. Hepplemann, Boris Hippolyte, Andrew S. Hirsch, Eric Hjort, A.M. Hoffman, Gerald W. Hoffmann, D.J. Hofman, R.S. Hollis, Huan Zhong Huang, Thomas J. Humanic, George J. Igo, A. Iordanova, P. Jacobs, William W. Jacobs, P. Jakl, F. Jin, C.L. Jones, Peter Graham Jones, J. Joseph, Eleanor G. Judd, Sonia Kabana, K. Kajimoto, K. Kang, J. Kapitan, Morton Kaplan, Declan Keane, Armen Kechechyan, D. Kettler, V.Yu. Khodyrev, D.P. Kikola, Joanna Kiryluk, Adam Ryszard Kisiel, Spencer Robert Klein, Anders Garritt Knospe, A. Kocoloski, Donald D. Koetke, M. Kopytine, L. Kotchenda, V. Kouchpil, Peter Kravtsov, Vladimir I. Kravtsov, Keith William Krueger, M. Krus, Christian Claude Kuhn, Lokesh Kumar, P. Kurnadi, Matthew A. C. Lamont, Jeffery M. Landgraf, S. LaPointe, Jerome Lauret, Alexei Lebedev, Richard Lednicky, C.-H. Lee, W. Leight, Micheal J. LeVine, C. Li, Y. Li, G. Lin, X. Lin, Sam J. Lindenbaum, Michael A. Lisa, F. Liu, H. Liu, J. Liu, L. Liu, Tonko A. Ljubicic, William Joseph Llope, Ronald S. Longacre, William A. Love, Y. Lu, Thomas Ludlam, David Lynn, G.L. Ma, Yu-Gang Ma, Durga Prasad Mahapatra, Richard Daniel Majka, O.I. Mall, L.K. Mangotra, Robert W. Manweiler, Spyridon Margetis, Christina Markert, Howard S. Matis, Yu.A. Matulenko, Tom S. McShane, Aleksei P. Meščanin, R. Millner, Nikolai G. Minaev, Saskia Mioduszewski, André Mischke, J. Mitchell, Bedangadas Mohanty, Dmitry A. Morozov, Marcelo Gameiro Munhoz, Basanta Kumar Nandi, Christine Nattrass, Tapan Kumar Nayak, John M. Nelson, C. Nepali, Pawan Kumar Netrakanti, M.J. Ng, Larisa V. Nogach, Sandibek B. Nurušev, Grazyna Janina Odyniec, Akio Ogawa, H. Okada, Vitaly A. Okorokov, Douglas L. Olson, Miloš Pachr, Brian S. Page, Susanta Kumar Pal, Y. Pandit, Yuri Panebratsev, Tomasz Jan Pawlak, Thomas Peitzmann, V. Perevoztchikov, Chris Perkins, Wiktor Stanislaw Peryt, S.C. Phatak, Mirko Planinic, Jan Marian Pluta, Nikola Poljak, Arthur M. Poskanzer, B.V.K.S. Potukuchi, Duncan J. Prindle, Claude A. Pruneau, Navneet Kumar Pruthi, Jörn H. Putschke, Rashmi Raniwala, Sudhir Raniwala, Robert L. Ray, R. Redwine, Rosi Jan Reed, Alexey Ridiger, Hans Georg Ritter, Jabus B. Roberts, Oleg V. Rogačevskij, Juan L. Romero, A. Rose, Christelle Sophie Roy, L. Ruan, M.J. Russcher, Vladimir L. Rykov, Raghunath Sahoo, Iwona Sakrejda, T. Sakuma, Sevil Salur, Jack H. Sandweiss, M. Sarsour, Igor A. Savin, Joachim Schambach, Rolf Paul Scharenberg, Norbert Schmitz, Janet Elizabeth Seger, Ilya Selyuzhenkov, Peter Seyboth, Alexandre Shabetai, Ehtiram Shahaliev, M. Shao, M. Sharma, Shusu Shi, X.-H. Shi, Ernst P. Sichtermann, F. Simon, Rama Narayana Singaraju, Michael J. Skoby, Nikolai Smirnov, Raimond Snellings, Paul Richard Sorensen, James Sowinski, Harold. M. Spinka, B. Srivastava, A. Stadnik, T. D. Shirvel Stanislaus, D. Staszak, Michail Nikolaevič Strichanov, Blair Stringfellow, Alexandre Alarcon do Passo Suaide, M.C. Suarez, N.L. Subba, Michal Šumbera, X.M. Sun, Y. Sun, Z. Sun, Bernd Surrow, Timothy James MacNeil Symons, Alejandro Szanto de Toledo, Jun Takahashi, Aihong Tang, Zebo Tang, Terence J. Tarnowsky, Dylan Thein, James H. Thomas, J. Tian, Anthony Robert Timmins, Sergei Timoshenko, David Tlusty, Mikhail V. Tokarev, T.A. Trainor, V.N. Tram, A.L. Trattner, Stephen Trentalange, Robert E. Tribble, Oleg D. Tsai, Jason Glyndwr Ulery, Thomas Ullrich, David G. Underwood, Gene Van Buren, Marco van Leeuwen, A.M. Vander Molen, J.A. Vanfossen, Raghava Varma, G.M.S. Vasconcelos, I.M. Vasilevski, Alexander Nikolaevich Vasiliev, Flemming Videbæk, Steven E. Vigdor, Yogendra P. Viyogi, Stanislav Vokal, Sergei Voloshin, M. Wada, William T. Waggoner, M. Walker, F. Wang, G. Wang, J.S. Wang, Q. Wang, X. Wang, X.L. Wang, Y. Wang, Jason C. Webb, Gary D. Westfall, Charles A. Whitten, Howard Wieman, Scott W. Wissink, Richard Witt, Y. Wu, N. Xu, Qinghua Xu, Y. Xu, Z. Xu, Pablo P. Yepes, In-Kwon Yoo, Q. Yue, M. Zawisza, Hanna Paulina Zbroszczyk, W. Zhan, H. Zhang, S. Zhang, W.M. Zhang, Y. Zhang, Z.P. Zhang, Y. Zhao, C. Zhong, J. Zhou, R. Zoulkarneev, Y. Zoulkarneeva, J.X. Zuo

• We study the beam-energy and system-size dependence of \phi meson production (using the hadronic decay mode \phi -- K+K-) by comparing the new results from Cu+Cu collisions and previously reported Au+Au collisions at \sqrt{s_NN} = 62.4 and 200 GeV measured in the STAR experiment at RHIC. Data presented are from mid-rapidity (|y|<0.5) for 0.4 < pT < 5 GeV/c. At a given beam energy, the transverse momentum distributions for \phi mesons are observed to be similar in yield and shape for Cu+Cu and Au+Au colliding systems with similar average numbers of participating nucleons. The \phi meson yields in nucleus-nucleus collisions, normalised by the average number of participating nucleons, are found to be enhanced relative to those from p+p collisions with a different trend compared to strange baryons. The enhancement for \phi mesons is observed to be higher at \sqrt{s_NN} = 200 GeV compared to 62.4 GeV. These observations for the produced \phi(s\bar{s}) mesons clearly suggest that, at these collision energies, the source of enhancement of strange hadrons is related to the formation of a dense partonic medium in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions and cannot be alone due to canonical suppression of their production in smaller systems.