The Heavy-Ion Physics Programme with the ATLAS Detector

The CERN LHC will collide lead ions at $\sqrt{s}=5.5$ TeV per nucleon pair and will provide crucial information about the formation of a quark--gluon plasma at the highest temperatures and densities ever created in the laboratory. We report on an updated evaluation of the ATLAS potential to study heavy--ion physics. The ATLAS detector will perform especially well for high $p_T$ phenomena even in the presence of the high--multiplicity soft background expected from lead-lead collisions, and most of the detector subsystems retain their nearly full capability. ATLAS will study a full range of observables which characterize the hot and dense medium formed in heavy--ion collisions. In addition to global measurements such as particle multiplicities and collective flow, heavy--quarkonia suppression, jet quenching and the modification of jets passing in the dense medium will be accessible. ATLAS will also study forward physics and ultraperipheral collisions using Zero Degree Calorimeters

Heavy Quarkonia Perspectives with Heavy-Ions in ATLAS

ATLAS will study a full range of observables and phenomena which characterize the hot dense medium formed in heavy-ion collisions, and in particular heavy quarkonia suppression which provides a handle on deconfinement mechanisms. As each quark-antiquark bound state is predicted to dissociate at a different temperature, the systematic measurement of the suppression of these resonances should provide some sort of thermometer of the early stage of the system evolution. We report on an evaluation of the ATLAS potential to measure resonances of the Upsilon and J/psi families created in Pb+Pb collisions

Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC with the ATLAS Detector

The ATLAS detector at CERN will provide a high-resolution longitudinally-segmented calorimeter and precision tracking for the upcoming study of heavy ion collisions at the LHC (sqrt(s_NN)=5520 GeV). The calorimeter covers |eta|<5 with both electromagnetic and hadronic sections, while the inner detector spectrometer covers |eta|<2.5. ATLAS will study a full range of observables necessary to characterize the hot and dense matter formed at the LHC. Global measurements (particle multiplicities, collective flow) will provide access into its thermodynamic and hydrodynamic properties. Measuring complete jets out to 100's of GeV will allow detailed studies of energy loss and its effect on jets. Quarkonia will provide a handle on deconfinement mechanisms. ATLAS will also study the structure of the nucleon and nucleus using forward physics probes and ultraperipheral collisions, both enabled by segmented Zero Degree Calorimeters.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to the Proceedings of Quark Matter 2006, Shanghai, China, November 14-20, 200

Pion Interactions in Chiral Field Theories

We study in various chiral models the pion charge radius, $\pi_{e3}$ form factor ratio, $\pi^\circ \to \gamma \gamma$ amplitude, charge pion polarizabilities, $\gamma\gamma \to \pi^\circ \pi^\circ$ amplitude at low energies and the $\pi\pi$ s-wave I = 0 scattering length. We find that a quark-level linear sigma-model approach (also being consistent with tree-level vector meson dominance) is quite compatible with all of the above data.Comment: 12 pages, 9 eps figure

Chiral Lagrangians

An overview of the field of Chiral Lagrangians is given. This includes Chiral Perturbation Theory and resummations to extend it to higher energies, applications to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, $\epsilon^\prime/\epsilon$ and others.Comment: Invited talk at the XX International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions at High Energies 23rd-28th July 2001, Rome Italy, 15 pages, uses ws-p10x7.cls Changes: 2 references added, numbers in g-2 hadronic changed slightl

Strong Interactions at Low Energy

The lectures review some of the basic concepts relevant for an understanding of the low energy properties of the strong interactions: chiral symmetry, spontaneous symmetry breakdown, Goldstone bosons, quark condensate. The effective field theory used to analyze the low energy structure is briefly sketched. As an illustration, I discuss the implications of the recent data on the decay $K\to \pi\pi e\nu$ for the magnitude of the quark condensate.Comment: Lectures given at the school of physics "Understanding the structure of hadrons", Prague, July 2001, 20 p

Three channel model of meson-meson scattering and scalar meson spectroscopy

New solutions on the scalar -- isoscalar $\pi\pi$ phase shifts are analysed together with previous $K\bar{K}$ results using a separable potential model of three coupled channels ($\pi\pi$, $K\bar{K}$ and an effective $2\pi 2\pi$ system). Model parameters are fitted to two sets of solutions obtained in a recent analysis of the CERN-Cracow-Munich measurements of the $\pi^- p_{\uparrow} \to \pi^+ \pi^- n$ reaction on a polarized target. A relatively narrow (90 -- 180 MeV) scalar resonance $f_0(1400-1460)$ is found, in contrast to a much broader ($\Gamma \approx 500$ MeV) state emerging from the analysis of previous unpolarized target data.Comment: 10 Latex pages + 6 postscript figure

UNDERSTANDING THE SCALAR MESON qqˉq\bar q NONET

It is shown that one can fit the available data on the a0(980), f0(980), f0(1300) and K*0(1430) mesons as a distorted 0++ qq bar nonet using very few (5-6) parameters and an improved version of the unitarized quark model. This includes all light two-pseudoscalar thresholds, constraints from Adler zeroes, flavour symmetric couplings, unitarity and physically acceptable analyticity. The parameters include a bare uu bar or dd bar mass, an over-all coupling constant, a cutoff and a strange quark mass of 100 MeV, which is in accord with expectations from the quark model. It is found that in particular for the a0(980) and f0(980) the KK bar component in the wave function is large, i.e., for a large fraction of the time the qq bar state is transformed into a virtual KK bar pair. This KK bar component, together with a similar component of eta' pi for the a0(980) , and eta eta, eta eta' and eta' eta' components for the f0(980), causes the substantial shift to a lower mass than what is naively expected from the qq bar component alone. Mass, width and mixing parameters, including sheet and pole positions, of the four resonances are given, with a detailed pedagogical discussion of their meaning.Comment: 35 pages in plain latex (ZPC in press), 10 figures obtainable from the author ([email protected]) with regular mail or as a large PS fil

On CP-Odd Effects in K_L \to 2\pi and K^{\pm} \to \pi^{\pm} \pi^{\pm} \pi^{\mp} Decays Generated by Direct CP Violation

The amplitudes of the K^{\pm} \to 3\pi and K \to 2\pi decays are expressed in terms of different combinations of one and the same set of CP-conserving and CP-odd parameters. Extracting the magnitudes of these parameters from the data on K \to 2\pi decays, we estimate an expected CP-odd difference between the values of the slope parameters g^+ and g^- of the energy distributions of "odd" pions in K^+ \to \pi^+\pi^+\pi^- and K^- \to \pi^-\pi^-\pi^+ decays.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

The isospin symmetry breaking effects in Ke4K_{e4} decays

The Fermi-Watson theorem is generalized to the case of two coupled channels with different masses and applied to final state interaction in $K_{e4}$ decays. The impact of considered effect on the phase of the $\pi\pi$ scattering is estimated and shown that it can be crucial for scattering lengths extraction from experimental data on $K_{e4}$ decays