Coherence Time in High Energy Proton-Nucleus Collisions

Abstract

Precisely measured Drell-Yan cross sections for 800 GeV protons incident on a variety of nuclear targets exhibit a deviation from linear scaling in the atomic number A. We show that this deviation can be accounted for by energy degradation of the proton as it passes through the nucleus if account is taken of the time delay of particle production due to quantum coherence. We infer an average proper coherence time of 0.4 +- 0.1 fm/c, corresponding to a coherence path length of 8 +- 2 fm in the rest frame of the nucleus.

11 pages in LaTeX. Includes 6 eps figures. Uses epsf.sty

References in corpus (2)

• Charged Particle Production in Proton-, Deuteron-, Oxygen- and Sulphur-Nucleus Collisions at 200 GeV per Nucleon
• Linear Extrapolation of Ultrarelativistic Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering to Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Parton energy loss limits and shadowing in Drell-Yan dimuon production
• High-p_T pion and kaon production in relativistic nuclear collisions
• Large mass dileptons from the passage of jets through quark gluon plasma
• Energy Loss versus Shadowing in the Drell-Yan Reaction on Nuclei
• Kinetic description of charmonium production in high-energy nuclear collisions
• Initial State Energy Loss Dependence of J/Psi and Drell-Yan in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• J/psi Production and Absorption in High Energy Proton-Nucleus Collisions
• Coherence Time Effects on J/psi Production and Suppression in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions