Abstract
Neutral pion and meson production in the transverse momentum range 1 20 have been measured at midrapidity by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in central and semicentral Pb-Pb collisions at = 2.76 TeV. These results were obtained using the photon conversion method as well as the Photon Spectrometer (PHOS) and Electromagnetic Calorimeter detectors. The results extend the upper reach of the previous ALICE measurements from 12 to 20 and present the first measurement of meson production in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. The ratio is similar for the two centralities and reaches at high a plateau value of 0.457 . A suppression of similar magnitude for and meson production is observed in Pb-Pb collisions with respect to their production in collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions. We discuss the results in terms of Next to Leading Order (NLO) pQCD predictions and hydrodynamic models. The measurements show a stronger suppression than observed at lower center-of-mass energies in the range 6 10 . For 3 , hadronization models describe the results while for the some tension is observed.
1 More- Received 21 March 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.98.044901
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
©2018 CERN, for the ALICE Collaboration