Astroparticle Seminar: Masayuki Wada, U of Texas-Austin "Searching for chiral symmetry restoration in relativistic heavy-ion collision w/ vector meson

"Searching for chiral symmetry restoration in relativistic heavy-ion collision with vector mesons" Abstract: Hadronic resonances can play a pivotal role in providing experimental evidence for partial chiral symmetry restoration in the deconfined quark-gluon phase produced in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC. Their short lifetimes, when comparable to the lifetime of the fireball, make them a valuable tool to study medium modifications to the resonant state due to the chiral phase transition signatures of mass shifts and/or width broadenings. This can be done via the leptonic decay of resonances having relatively small interaction cross-section of leptonic daughter particles with dense hadronic medium. The measurement of $\phi \rightarrow e^{+}e^{-}$ at mid-rapidity ($|y|<1$) from STAR experiment in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV are presented and compared to the $\phi$ meson result from the hadronic decay channel. STAR group page: http://www.star.bnl.gov/ Host: Cristiano Galbiati