Antimatter and Matter Production in Heavy Ion Collisions at CERN (The NEWMASS Experiment NA52)

Abstract

Besides the dedicated search for strangelets NA52 measures light (anti)particle and (anti)nuclei production over a wide range of rapidity. Compared to previous runs the statistics has been increased in the 1998 run by more than one order of magnitude for negatively charged objects at different spectrometer rigidities. Together with previous data taking at a rigidity of -20 GeV/c we obtained 10^6 antiprotons 10^3 antideuterons and two antihelium3 without centrality requirements. We measured nuclei and antinuclei (p,d,antiprotons, antideuterons) near midrapidity covering an impact parameter range of b=2-12 fm. Our results strongly indicate that nuclei and antinuclei are mainly produced via the coalescence mechanism. However the centrality dependence of the antibaryon to baryon ratios show that antibaryons are diminished due to annihilation and breakup reactions in the hadron dense environment. The volume of the particle source extracted from coalescence models agrees with results from pion interferometry for an expanding source. The chemical and thermal freeze-out of nuclei and antinuclei appear to coincide with each other and with the thermal freeze-out of hadrons.