1. Identification of Upsilon Particles Using the Preshower Detector in STAR Jay Dunkelberger, University of Florida 2007 Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute REU Advisor: Dr. Saskia Mioduszewski Quark-Gluon Plasma Quarks are the constituents of all hadronic matter They interact with each other by the strong force which is mediated by gluons Quarks are confined to exist in either pairs (mesons) or triplets (baryons) At temperatures above 10¹² K the boundaries of various hadrons overlap Quarks enter a deconfined state and become a new phase of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) The STAR Experiment Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Au nuclei are accelerated to.99995c and collide head-on inside the detector, possibly resulting in the creation of QGP STAR has several subsystems (e.g., Time Projection Chamber, EM Calorimeter) to track the products of these collisions and look for signs of the QGP Layout of RHICDiagram of the STAR Detector Barrel Electromagnetic Calorimeter Consists of 4800 towers covering the entire azimuthal range Each tower is made up of 21 layers of Pb and scintillator Particles interact with the Pb layers and produce showers which are converted to light in the scintillator 84% of electrons shower in the first two layers of the BEMC as opposed to only 6% of hadrons The first two layers of each tower have their values read out separately and form the Preshower detector Barrel Preshower Detector (BPRS) The BPRS allows for the reduction of hadronic background by taking advantage of the fact that electrons generally shower earlier than hadrons. The BPRS has not yet been used as a part of STAR’s analysis. We began work on a quality assurance analysis to include the BPRS in STAR’s run status table database. BEMC Tower A rough analysis of the Preshower detector’s effectiveness. The graphs show energy loss with distance (dE/dx) as measured in STAR’s Time Projection Chamber. The right is with a cut on a signal in the Preshower while the left is without. The red peak results from hadrons while the blue is from electrons. Integrating these Gaussians showed that the relative yield of electrons increased by about a factor of two when the Preshower is included. Importance of Heavy Quarkonia In the QGP it is expected that the formation of heavy quarkonia will be suppressed This has already been observed at lower energies for J/ψ particles, however the measurement of J/ψ suppression is complicated, at RHIC energies, by the competing recombination of J/ψ particles The upsilon particle has a much larger mass than J/ψ, greatly reducing the chance of recombination. The relative suppressions of these particles could be an important sign of the QGP Detecting Upsilon Particles We looked for Υ particles that decayed to a positron and an electron. We used a combinatorial method to generate opposite- sign pairs and created an invariant mass plot. We then used the same method making like-sign pairs to create a background. We incorporated the BPRS into our analysis to reduce the number of hadrons in our calculation. Finally, we subtracted out the background and looked for an Υ mass peak at ~9.5 GeV/c². This analysis requires a great deal of statistics and is ongoing. Reduction of Hadronic Background A comparison of the raw ADC output of the BEMC and BPRS detectors, which are used in STAR’s status table package. Status tables are needed to catalogue towers that are giving erroneous data. An Illustration of Quark-Gluon Plasma