Date: Wednesday 29th October 2003
Title: Strangeness Enhancement in Heavy Ion collisions at the SPS
Speaker: Rory Clarke (Birmingham)
Abstract
The NA57 experiment is continuing work from the WA97 experiment that
detected a significant enhancement in the production of strange particles
in heavy ion collision experiments at beam momenta of 160 GeV/c conducted
at the SPS collider at CERN.
This enhancement of strange particles indicated that a new state of matter
speculated by theory had indeed been formed where a deconfined plasma of
quarks and gluons exist at the extream energy densities produced by these
collisions.
The NA57 experiments motivation is to further investigate the transition
from hadronic to plasma phase boundary by studying heavy ion collisions at
160GeV/c and a lower beam momentum of 40GeV/c with a greater centrality
range than WA97.