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Enrico Scomparin

Publications and source records attributed to Enrico Scomparin.

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The future fixed-target program at the CERN SPS

The CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) can currently accelerate heavy ions in the energy range from 13.5 up to 150 A GeV and deliver them to fixed-target experiments. It is the facility where Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) experimental studies began in 1986. After a first phase until 2000, with several fundamental discoveries made by a number of dedicated experiments, the physics program continued until today with the NA60 (dileptons, 2003-2004) and NA61 (hadronic observables, from 2009) experiments. As of today, a continuation of QGP studies, after the current shutdown of CERN accelerators, is foreseen, involving NA61 and a newly approved experiments, NA60+/DiCE. In this contribution, I will briefly describe the main achievements of the CERN SPS program, discuss the proposed new measurements and their impact on our knowledge of the QGP in the finite $\mu_{\rm B}$ region of the QCD phase diagram.

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Experiments at the CERN SPS: first signals of deconfinement

Heavy-ion experiments at the CERN SPS began in the mid-1980s to study nuclear matter at extreme temperatures and densities. The program started with light ions, such as oxygen and sulphur, at energies of 60A GeV and 200A GeV, later advancing to lead ions at 158A GeV. A series of experiments, employing novel detector technologies, explored various signatures of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formation. In February 2000, these results led CERN to announce evidence for the QGP formation. Subsequently, an energy scan was conducted with lead ions from 20A GeV to 158A GeV, to locate the threshold of QGP creation.

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Measuring dilepton and heavy quark production at large $μ_{\rm B}$: the NA60+ experiment at the CERN SPS

The high-$μ_{\rm B}$ region of the QCD phase diagram has become the object of several studies, focused on the investigation of the order of the phase transition and the search for the critical point. Accessing rare probes is experimentally challenging as it requires large integrated luminosities, and a fixed-target environment represents an ideal solution for these studies. The CERN SPS covers, with large beam intensity, the collision energy region $5<\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}<17$ GeV. A future experiment, NA60+, is being proposed to access this region and perform accurate measurements of the dimuon spectrum from threshold up to the charmonium mass region, and of hadronic decays of charm and strange hadrons. The experiment, which is also part of the Physics Beyond Colliders CERN initiative, aims at taking its first data with Pb and proton beams around 2029.

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ALICE results on quarkonia

The ALICE experiment has measured quarkonia production in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN LHC, in the rapidity ranges |y|<0.9 and 2.5<y<4. Quarkonia are considered to be a sensitive probe of deconfinement, and a detailed differential study of their yields can give important information on the properties of the medium created in heavy-ion collisions. In this paper, we will mainly discuss the centrality dependence of the J/psi nuclear modification factors, as well as their p_T and y dependence in bins of centrality, which will be then compared to theoretical models. Preliminary results on the J/psi elliptic flow and on psi(2S) production will also be shown.

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