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Production of neutral strange hadrons with high transverse momentum in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV
(2006)
The motivation for studying ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is to search for signatures of a transition from hadronic matter to a partonic phase, the Quark-Gluon plasma. The bulk of the particles produced in these collisions possesses transverse momenta of pT < 2 GeV/c and evidence for the production of a Quark-Gluon plasma at SPS energies has been found in the properties of particles from this pT range. The rare particles seen in the higher pT domain can complete the picture of the produced matter. Examples for such high pT signatures include the properties of the baryon/meson ratios and the elliptic flow in the region 2 < pT < 4 GeV/c observed at RHIC. They can be explained by quark coalescence models. This phase space range can also be accessed for analysis at the highest SPS beam energy of 158 A GeV. A study of the pT dependence of baryon/meson ratios here can help to answer the question which hadron production mechanisms are relevant in this energy range. In the NA49 large acceptance hadron spectrometer, K0S and Lambda are identified via the V 0 topology of their decay into charged hadrons and the determination of their invariant mass. The reach in pT of this method is only limited by the statistics of the available data. An important part of the analysis presented in this thesis is to select potential V 0 candidates by adequate cuts. Optimisation for the high pT domain requires careful cuts in order to retain the signal there. A challenge implicated by this approach is the large combinatorial background left over by the loose cuts. A reliable signal extraction method was found that can deal with this possible difficulty and provide raw spectra.The fraction of particles that cannot be detected because of the geometrical acceptance of the detector and analysis inefficiencies was determined in simulations. Correction factors are extracted from this simulation for each phase space bin and applied to the raw spectra. The spectra corrected in this way reach pT = 3.6 GeV/c (for K0 S) and pT = 3.8 GeV/c (Lambda), respectively. The whole analysis method has been checked to be self-consistent and was compared to existing data on kaon and ... production, that is only available in the lower pT range. While the Lambda spectra agree with an earlier analysis [44], a disagreement remains between the results for K0 S presented here and charged kaon data published in [42]. The Lambda/K0 S ratio calculated from the corrected spectra qualitatively agrees with the results for the higher collision energy at RHIC [8]. A saturation of the ratio for pT >= 2 GeV/c clearly indicates that the hydrodynamical picture is not valid in the higher range any more. Unfortunately, no calculations from coalescence models are available for the SPS energy range so far.