"Naked" Cronin effect in A+A collisions from SPS to RHIC

Abstract

Baseline computations of the Cronin effect in nuclear collisions at energies spanning the SPS and the RHIC accelerators are performed in the Glauber-Eikonal model, which ascribes the effect to initial-state incoherent multiple parton scatterings. The model accounts very well for the mid-rapidity Cronin effect in hadron-nucleus collisions in the 27-200 GeV center of mass energy range, and will be extended to nucleus-nucleus collisions. The computations are performed under the assumption that the partons do not interact with the medium produced in the collision. Therefore, medium effects such as energy loss in a Quark-Gluon Plasma may be detected and measured as deviations from the presented baseline computation of the "naked" Cronin effect.