Centrality Effects on Heavy-Flavor Quark Production and Invariant Yield in PHENIX Proton–Gold Collisions at Center-of-Mass Energy 200 GeV, and Assembly, Testing, Calibration, and Installation of the sPHENIX Hadronic Calorimeters
Hadrons created in heavy-ion collisions interact with the open color-charge of the quark-gluon plasma through their constituent quarks. The medium imparts substantial modifications to heavy-flavor hadrons' momentum spectra. For collisions of small systems, the centrality of those collisions affects both the production of heavy-quarks and the medium modifications that the heavy-quarks experience. This analysis uses the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collected data from proton--gold collisions in 2015, with a trigger to preference the collection of the five-percent most-central collisions. This analysis uses the distance-of-closest-approach of electron tracks to study semileptonic decays from charm and bottom hadrons, and Bayesian unfolding to separate the two flavors. Additionally, this thesis presents background and analysis of the minimum-ionizing-particles observed by the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeter during the assembly and testing phase of that experiment's construction and commissioning.
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York