Study of transverse energy production in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Understanding the transverse energy production in heavy-ion collisions is of paramount importance, in order to characterize the produced system and en sure the minimum energy density requirement for the formation of a deconfined system of quarks and gluons, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In this work, we have studied the transverse energy (ET ) distributions for Au-Au collisions at RHIC energies and fitted a two parameter gamma distribution function to centrality-wise ET distributions. We clearly observe that the shape parameter (α) is centrality dependent but, it does not depend on center-of-mass energy of the colliding nuclei. However, the rate parameter (β) is energy dependent. β also shows very little variation when seen as a function of centrality. A com parative study of convolution and summation of centrality-wise ET distributions is also performed. It is found that, the minimum-bias ET distribution can be obtained from bin-wise summation of the individual centrality-wise ET distribu tions.