Performance of the alice muon spectrometer. Weak boson production and measurement in heavy-ion collisions at lhc
- Autores: Zaida Conesa del Valle
- Directores de la Tesis: Ginés Martínez (dir. tes.), Francisco Fernández Moreno (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2007
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Klaus Werner Schatz (presid.), David D'Enterria Adan (secret.), Ermanno Vercellin (voc.), Ginés Martínez (voc.), Etienne Auge (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Lattice QCD predicts a transition from an hadronic phase to a Quark Gluon Plasma phase, QGP, for temperatures above 10¿{13} K. Heavy-ion collisions are proposed to recreate it in the laboratory. With such purpose, the LHC will provide Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV/u, and the ALICE experiment will permit to explore them. In particular, the ALICE muon spectrometer will permit to investigate the muon related probes (quarkonia, open beauty,...). The expected apparatus performances to measure muons and dimuons are discussed. A factorization technique is employed to unravel the different contributions to the global efficiency. Results indicate that the detector should be able to measure muons up to pt = 100 GeV/c with a resolution of about 10%. We show that weak bosons production could be measured for the first time in heavy-ion collisions. Single muon pt and dimuons invariant mass distributions will probe W and Z production. As mainly muons from b- and c-quarks decays will populate the intermediate-pt of 5-25 GeV/c, heavy quark in-medium energy loss calculations indicate that the single muon spectra would be suppressed by a factor 2-4 in the most central 0-10% Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV. However, for pt > 35 GeV/c the weak boson decays are predominant, and no suppression is expected. Estimations indicate that the b- and W-muons crossing point shifts down in transverse momenta by 5 to 7 GeV/c in the most central 0-10% Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV.
