Charm quarks as a probe of matter produced in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions

M. Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Reymonta 4, 30-059 Kraków Poland

^a e-mail: yasir.ali@uj.edu.pl

Published online: 29 April 2014

Abstract

Direct measurement of hadrons containing charm quark carries important information about the initial stage of the nucleus-nucleus collision at relativistic energies. The study of open charm in Pb-Pb collisions at SPS energies will be a powerful tool to investigate the production of heavy flavours and their interaction with the medium produced in such collisions. A feasibility study was initiated for the measurement of the D⁰ mesons (open charm) by its two-body decay into pion and kaon in central Pb-Pb collision at SPS energies in NA61/SHINE experiment. To generate the physical input we used AMPT (A Multi Phase Transport Model) event generator and employed GEANT4 application to describe particle transport through the NA61/SHINE experimental setup supplemented by a future vertex detector (VD) that will allow for precise vertex reconstruction close to the primary interaction point. The results of the simulation shows that this measurement is feasible with a dedicated VD which allows the precise tracking close to the target.