Experiment NA61 /SHINE at the CERN SPS:Search for the Critical Point andStudy of the Onset of Deconfinement

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Marek Gazdzicki
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2010 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 179344391

• Final Report Year: 2018

Final Report Abstract

The main results of the project are as follows: (i) The NA61/SHINE two-dimensional scan in nuclear mass of colliding nuclei and collision energy was completed by the data taking on Ar+Sc and Xe+La collisions at 13A, 20A, 30A, 40A, 75A and 150. (ii) The NA61/SHINE measurements for strong interaction, cosmic-ray and neutrino physics were extended by measurements on Pb+Pb collisions, nuclear fragmentation cross section and Fermilab neutrino experiments, respectively. (iii) Preliminary results from the two-dimensional scan show (a) no evidence for the critical point of strongly interacting matter, (b) evidence for the onset of fireball, an unexpected discovery of a rapid transition from non-equilibrium to equilibrium system when the nuclear mass number of colliding nuclei increases. Motivated by the success of the current measurements, the NA61/SHINE Collaboration proposed to CERN a new physics program with measurements to be performed between 2021 and 2024. In spite of the small resources allocated to it by the DFG, the project was clearly very successfully. This can be explained by a significant financial support from other NA61/ SHINE institutions as well as the unexpected discovery, the onset of fireball, which is based on results obtained from a relatively simple analysis of the experimental data. The achieved progress was communicated to public mostly using CERN media, see the public NA61/SHINE web-site for a collection of the reports: http://shine.web. cern.ch/ .

Publications

• “From p+p to Pb+Pb Collisions: Wounded Nucleon versus Statistical Models,” PoS CPOD 2013, 038 (2013)
  M. Gazdzicki
  
• “Normalization of strongly intensive quantities,” Phys. Rev. C 88, no. 2, 024907 (2013)
  M. Gazdzicki, M. I. Gorenstein and M. Mackowiak-Pawlowska
  
• “Measurement of negatively charged pion spectra in inelastic p+p interactions at plab = 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c,” Eur. Phys. J. C 74, no. 3, 2794 (2014)
  N. Abgrall et al. [NA61/SHINE Collaboration]
  
• “NA61/SHINE facility at the CERN SPS: beams and detector system,” JINST 9, P06005 (2014)
  N. Abgrall et al. [NA61 Collaboration]
  
• “Recent results from NA61/SHINE,” EPJ Web Conf. 95, 01005 (2015)
  M. Gazdzicki [NA61/SHINE Collaboration]
  
• “Statistical Model of the Early Stage of nucleus-nucleus collisions with exact strangeness conservation,” Acta Phys. Polon. B 46, no. 10, 1991 (2015)
  R. V. Poberezhnyuk, M. Gazdzicki and M. I. Gorenstein
  
• “Fluctuations in the Statistical Model of the Early Stage of nucleus-nucleus collisions,” Acta Phys. Polon. B 47, 2055 (2016)
  R. V. Poberezhnyuk, M. I. Gorenstein and M. Gazdzicki
  
• “Multiplicity and transverse momentum fluctuations in inelastic protonâĂŞproton interactions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron,” Eur. Phys. J. C 76, no. 11, 635 (2016)
  A. Aduszkiewicz et al. [NA61/SHINE Collaboration]
  
• “Measurements of π ±, K±, p and p¯ spectra in proton-proton interactions at 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c with the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS,” Eur. Phys. J. C 77, no. 10, 671 (2017)
  A. Aduszkiewicz et al. [NA61/SHINE Collaboration]
  
• “Steady state of isolated systems versus microcanonical ensemble in cell model of particle creation and annihilation,” Int. J. Mod. Phys. E 26, no. 12, 1750085 (2017)
  M. Gazdzicki, M. I. Gorenstein, A. Fronczak, P. Fronczak and M. Mackowiak- Pawlowska