High Tranverse Momentum Suppression in Au+Au Collisions

Abstract

Great interest has attached to recent Au+Au, E = 200 A GeV measurements at RHIC, obtained with the PHENIX, STAR, PHOBOS and BRAHMS detectors. For central collisions and vanishing pseudo-rapidity all experiments indicate a considerable lowering in charged particle production at mid to large transverse momenta. In the PHENIX experiment similar behavior has been reported for pi0 spectra. In a recent work on the presumably simpler D+Au interaction, to be considered perhaps as a tune-up for Au+Au, we reported on a hadronic cascade mechanism which can explain the observed but somewhat reduced pT suppression at higher pseudo rapidity as well as the Cronin enhancement at mid rapidity. Here we report on the extension of this work to the more massive ion-ion collisions.