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J. Schukraft

Publications and source records attributed to J. Schukraft.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Charting the European Course to the High-Energy Frontier

We review the capabilities of two projects that have been proposed as the next major European facility, for consideration in the upcoming update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics: CLIC and FCC. We focus on their physics potentials and emphasise the key differences between the linear or circular approaches. We stress the uniqueness of the FCC-ee programme for precision electroweak physics at the $Z$ peak and the $WW$ threshold, as well as its unequalled statistics for Higgs physics and high accuracy for observing possible new phenomena in Higgs and $Z$ decays, whereas CLIC and FCC-ee offer similar capabilities near the $t \overline t$ threshold. Whilst CLIC offers the possibility of energy upgrades to 1500 and 3000 GeV, FCC-ee paves the way for FCC-hh. The latter offers unique capabilities for making direct or indirect discoveries in a new energy range, and has the highest sensitivity to the self-couplings of the Higgs boson and any anomalous couplings. We consider the FCC programme to be the best option to maintain Europe's place at the high-energy frontier during the coming decades.

hep-ex

Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC: What's new ? What's next ?

Towards the end of 2010, some 25 years after the very first collisions of ultra-relativistic heavy ions at fixed target energies, and some 10 years after the start of operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC opened a new era in heavy ion physics with lead on lead collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV. After a short reminder of the main results from lower energies, this review highlights a few selected areas where significant progress has been made during the first three years of ion operation at the LHC.

hep-ex

Hard Probes 2012: Experimental Summary

The 5th international Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions was held in May 2012 in Cagliari, Italy. This contribution summarises some of the experimental highlights presented at the meeting, concentrating on new results from LHC and RHIC on parton energy loss ('jet-quenching') and heavy quark meson production ('quarkonia suppression').

nucl-ex

Results from the first heavy ion run at the LHC

Early November 2010, the LHC collided for the first time heavy ions, Pb on Pb, at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV/nucleon. This date marked both the end of almost 20 years of preparing for nuclear collisions at the LHC, as well as the start of a new era in ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics at energies exceeding previous machines by more than an order of magnitude. This contribution summarizes some of the early results from all three experiments participating in the LHC heavy ion program (ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS), which show that the high density matter created at the LHC, while much hotter and larger, still behaves like the very strongly interacting, almost perfect liquid discovered at RHIC. Some surprising and even puzzling results are seen in particle ratios, jet-quenching, and Quarkonia suppression observables. The overall experimental conditions at the LHC, together with its set of powerful and state-of-the-art detectors, should allow for precision measurements of quark-gluon-plasma parameters like viscosity and opacity.

hep-ex

Heavy Ion physics with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC

After close to 20 years of preparation, the dedicated heavy ion experiment ALICE took first data at the CERN LHC accelerator with proton collisions at the end of 2009 and with lead nuclei at the end of 2010. After a short introduction into the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, this article recalls the main design choices made for the detector and summarizes the initial operation and performance of ALICE. Physics results from this first year of operation concentrate on characterizing the global properties of typical, average collisions, both in pp and nucleus-nucleus reactions, in the new energy regime of LHC. The pp results differ, to a varying degree, from most QCD inspired phenomenological models and provide the input needed to fine-tune their parameters. First results from Pb-Pb are broadly consistent with expectations based on lower energy data, indicating that high density matter created at LHC, while much hotter and larger, still behaves like a very strongly interacting, almost perfect liquid.

hep-ex

ALICE results from the first Pb-Pb run at the CERN LHC

After 20 years of preparation, the dedicated heavy ion experiment ALICE took first data at the CERN LHC accelerator with proton collisions at the end of 2009 and with lead beams at the end of 2010. This article will give a brief overview of the main results presented at the Quark Matter 2011 conference.

hep-ex

Azimuthal dependence of pion source radii in Pb+Au collisions at 158 A GeV

We present results of a two-pion correlation analysis performed with the Au+Pb collision data collected by the upgraded CERES experiment in the fall of 2000. The analysis was done in bins of the reaction centrality and the pion azimuthal emission angle with respect to the reaction plane. The pion source, deduced from the data, is slightly elongated in the direction perpendicular to the reaction plane, similarly as was observed at the AGS and at RHIC.

nucl-ex

The Future of High Energy Nuclear Physics in Europe

In less than two years from now, the LHC at CERN will start operating with protons and later with heavy ions in the multi TeV energy range. With its unique physics potential and a strong, state-of-the complement of detectors, the LHC will provide the European, and in fact worldwide Nuclear Physics community, with a forefront facility to study nuclear matter under extreme conditions well into the next decade.

nucl-ex

CERN, a working example of global scientific collaboration

The topic of this conference is 'South-South and North-South Collaboration in Science and Technology', which is addressed in this contribution in the context of basic research in high energy physics (HEP). The question whether developing countries can or should invest scarce resources in big science is not covered. HEP may be less expensive than one might fear, but cheap it is not, so priorities have to be set and these may indeed differ from country to country. The scope of this article is not to argue one way or another, but rather to give an indication and practical examples of both the requirements and the opportunities for scientific collaboration with CERN.

physics.soc-ph

e+e--pair production in Pb-Au collisions at 158 GeV per nucleon

We present the combined results on electron-pair production in 158 GeV/n {Pb-Au} ($\sqrt{s}$= 17.2 GeV) collisions taken at the CERN SPS in 1995 and 1996, and give a detailed account of the data analysis. The enhancement over the reference of neutral meson decays amounts to a factor of 2.31$\pm0.19 (stat.)\pm0.55 (syst.)\pm0.69 (decays)$ for semi-central collisions (28% $σ/σ_{geo}$) when yields are integrated over $m>$ 200 MeV/$c^2$ in invariant mass. The measured yield, its stronger-than-linear scaling with $N_{ch}$, and the dominance of low pair $p_t$ strongly suggest an interpretation as {\it thermal radiation} from pion annihilation in the hadronic fireball. The shape of the excess centring at $m\approx$ 500 MeV/$c^2$, however, cannot be described without strong medium modifications of the $ρ$ meson. The results are put into perspective by comparison to predictions from Brown-Rho scaling governed by chiral symmetry restoration, and from the spectral-function many-body treatment in which the approach to the phase boundary is less explicit.

nucl-ex