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# Steep Inflation followed by Born-Infeld Reheating

## I Introduction

Recently, there have been attempts to build models with a single scalar field playing the dual role of inflation at early epochs and quintessence at late timesvilenkin ; lid ; liddle ; lidsey1 ; tarun ; majumdar ; lidsey2 ; nunes . Apparently, there are two obstacles in carrying out the program of unification of inflation with quintessence. First, the conventional reheating mechanism does not work in these models and an alternative reheating method has to be employed. Secondly, the scalar field after successfully playing the inflaton role should go into hiding so as not to disturb the thermal history in the standard model. It should emerge out from the shadow only at late times to dominate the energy density of the universe and become quintessence. As for the reheating, it can be achieved through a quantum mechanical process of particle production in time varying gravitational field at the end of inflationford ; spokoiny ; liddle . However, then the inflaton energy density should red-shift faster than that of the produced particles so that radiation domination could commence. And this requires a steep scalar field potential, which of course can not support inflation in the standard FRW cosmology. This is precisely where the brane assisted inflation comes to the rescue.

The presence of the quadratic density term (high energy corrections) in the Friedman equation on the brane changes the expansion dynamics in the early universe: at early times, the brane world Hubble parameter is much larger than its usual Friedman valuerandall ; shiromizu ; braneindustry . Consequently, the field experiences greater damping and rolls down its potential slower than it would during the conventional inflation. Thus, inflation in the brane world scenario can successfully occur for very steep potentials (see Refgman  for a different approach to steep inflation).

The second problem can be resolved by employing the “Tracker Fields”. For instance, scalar field models with exponential potential have an attractive property that the energy density in the field tracks the background (radiation and/or matter) energy density remaining sub-dominant so as to respect the nucleo-synthesis constraint. However at late times, the potential should behave otherwise, allowing the scalar field to play the dominant role in the evolution dynamics of the universe. One, possibility is that during late times the potential changes to power law , resulting in rapid oscillations of the field near origin. In case of a particular power law, the average equation of state may turn negative making the field energy density scale slower (than the background energy density) and dominant at late times to account for the observed acceleration of the universe. The cosine hyperbolic potentials has both these features. Another possibility is provided by a class of inverse power law potentials which at late times become shallow enough to support the conventional FRW inflation allowing the inflaton to become a ‘quintessence’. It is remarkable that extra dimensional effects allow a single scalar field to play the dual role of inflaton as well as the dark energy.

Unfortunately these models using the gravitational particle production as a reheating mechanism are faced with a serious problem associated with the relic gravity background. In fact, a generic feature of inflationary models with steep potentials is that the post inflationary epoch is characterized by a prolonged kinetic regime which lasts until the energy density of radiation (created quantum mechanically during inflation) becomes equal to the scalar field energy density. A long duration of kinetic regime results in a gravity wave spectral density which increases with wave number for wave lengths shorter than the comoving Hubble radius at the commencement of the radiative regime and leads to violation of the cosmological nucleosynthesis constraintstarun .

An interesting proposal which circumvents this difficulty has recently been suggested by Liddle and Lopezcurvaton , see also Refscurvaton1 ; curvatonJ ; curvaton2 ; curvaton3  on the similar theme. The authors have employed a new method of reheating via curvaton to address the problems associated with gravitational particle production mechanism. The curvaton model as shown in Refcurvaton  can in principal resolve the difficulties related to excessive amplitude of short-scale gravitational waves. Although this model is interesting, it operates through a very complex network of constraints dictated by the fine tuning of parameters of the model.

A very interesting proposal has recently been made in Refbi1 . It is advocated that the Born-Infeld actionbi2 ; bi3 ; bi3panda ; bi4  should be used in the context of the brane world cosmology (see Refsalim  on the related theme). It is remarkable that the energy density of the Born-Infeld matter mimics the cosmological constant like behavior at very early times and scales as radiation later. As the the Born-Infeld action considered in bi1  is composed of the non-linear vector fields, the density perturbations are absent in the model.

In this paper we examine an attractive alternative reheating mechanism based upon Born-Infeld action. We propose a toy model in which apart from the Born-Infeld matter there is a scalar field with steep potential that drives inflation on the brane and the field survives to date to become quintessence. The Born-Infeld matter remains subdominant during inflation and does not interfere with the inflationary dynamics of the scalar field. At the end of inflation, the energy density of the Born-Infeld matter behaves like radiation. The radiation energy density at the end of inflation can be conveniently chosen so as to respect the nucleosynthesis constraint. Since the Born-Infeld action does not include any new parameter, no extra fine tuning of the parameters is required in this model.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the section II, we briefly review the Born-Infeld brane world proposed in Ref bi1 . In the section III, we would suggest an inflationary scenario with the Born-Infeld reheating and discuss the evolution of the universe. Finally we give the summary and discussion.

## II Born-Infeld Brane Worlds

The D-branes are fundamental objects in string theory. The end points of the open string to which the gauge fields are attached are constrained to lie on the branes. As the string theory contains gravity, the D-branes are the dynamical objects. The effective D-brane action is given by the Born-Infeld action

$$S_{BI}=\lambda _bd^4x\sqrt{\mathrm{det}\left(g_{\mu \nu }+F_{\mu \nu }\right)}$$
(1)
where $`F_{\mu \nu }`$ is the elecromagnetic field tensor (Non-Abelian gauge fields could also be included in the action) and $`\lambda _b`$ is the brane tension. The Born-Infeld action, in general, also includes Fermi fields which have been dropped for simplicity. In the brane world scenario a la Randall-Sundrum one adopts the Nambu-Goto action instead of the Born-Infeld action. Shiromizu et al have suggested that in the true spirit of the string theory, the total action in the brane world cosmology be composed of the bulk and D-brane actions

$$S=S_{bulk}+S_{BI},$$
(2)
where $`S_{bulk}`$ is the five dimensional Einstein-Hilbert action with the negative cosmological constant. The stress tensor appearing on the right hand side (RHS) of the Einstein equations on the brane will now be sourced by the Born-Infeld action. The modified Friedman equation on a spatially flat FRW brane acquires the form

$$H^2=\frac{1}{3M_p^2}\rho _{BI}\left(1+\frac{\rho _{BI}}{2\lambda _b}\right)$$
(3)
with $`\rho _{BI}`$ given by

$$\rho _{BI}=ϵ+\frac{ϵ^2}{6\lambda _b}$$
(4)
where $`E^2=B^2=ϵ`$ 111We retain here the terms of the order of $`ϵ^2`$ only which is analogous to the treatment of the higher order derivative corrections. Although there should be infinite number of the correction terms, we neglect them to make the analysis tractable which facilitates the study of entire history of our universe. The $`ϵ^2`$ term corresponds to the $`R^2`$ term in the higher derivative theory and similarly the higher powers. Our truncation of the series at $`ϵ^2`$ is thus similar to the truncation at $`R^2`$ in the higher order theory.  The tension $`\lambda _b`$ is tuned so that the net cosmological constant on the brane vanishes. We have dropped the ‘dark radiation’ term in the equation (3) as it rapidly disappear once inflation sets in. Spatial averaging is assumed while computing $`\rho _{BI}`$ and $`P_{BI}`$ from the stress-tensor corresponding to action (1). The scaling of energy density of the Born-Infeld matter, as usual, can be established from the conservation equation

$$\dot{\rho }_{BI}+3H(\rho _{BI}+P_{BI})=0$$
(5)
where

$$P_{BI}=\frac{ϵ}{3}\frac{ϵ^2}{6\lambda _b}$$
(6)
Interestingly, the pressure due to the Born-Infeld matter becomes negative in the high energy regime allowing the accelerated expansion at early times without the introduction of a scalar field. As shown in bi1  , the energy density $`\rho _{BI}`$ scales as radiation when $`ϵ<<6\lambda _b`$. For $`ϵ>6\lambda _b`$, the Born-Infeld matter energy density starts scaling slowly (logarithmically) with the scale factor to mimic the cosmological constant like behavior. The point is that the Born-Infeld matter is subdominant during the inflationary stage. It comes to play the important role after the end of inflation when it behaves like radiation and hence serves as an alternative to reheating mechanism.

## III The Hybrid Brane Worlds

The brane world cosmology based upon the Born-Infeld action looks promising as it is perfectly tuned with the D-brane ideology. But since the Born-Infeld action is composed of the non-linear elecromagnetic field, the D-brane cosmology proposed in Refbi1  can not accommodate density perturbations at least in its present formulation. One could include a scalar field in the Born-Infeld action, say, a tachyon condensate to correct the situation. However, such a scenario faces the difficulties associated with reheating and formation of acoustics/kinkstytgat . We shall therefore not follow this track. We shall assume that the scalar field driving the inflation (quintessence) on the brane is described by the usual four dimensional action for the scalar fields. The total action is given by

$$S=S_{bulk}+S_{BI}+S_{4\mathrm{d}\mathrm{scalar}}$$
(7)
where

$$S_{4\mathrm{d}\mathrm{scalar}}=\left(\frac{1}{2}g^{\mu \nu }_\mu \varphi _\nu \varphi V(\varphi )\right)\sqrt{g}d^4x$$
(8)
The energy momentum tensor for the field $`\varphi `$ which arises from the action (8) is given by

$$T_{\mu \nu }=_\mu \varphi _\nu \varphi g_{\mu \nu }\left[\frac{1}{2}g^{\mu \nu }_\mu \varphi _\nu \varphi +V(\varphi )\right]$$
(9)
In the homogeneous and isotropic universe, the field energy density $`\rho _\varphi `$ and pressure $`p_\varphi `$ obtained from $`T_{\mu \nu }`$ are

$$\rho _\varphi =\frac{\dot{\varphi }^2}{2}+V(\varphi ),p_\varphi =\frac{\dot{\varphi }^2}{2}V(\varphi )$$
(10)
The scalar field propagating on the brane modifies the Friedman equation to

$$H^2=\frac{1}{3M_p^2}\rho _{tot}\left(1+\frac{\rho _{tot}}{2\lambda _b}\right)$$
(11)
where $`\rho _{tot}`$ is given by

$$\rho _{tot}=\rho _\varphi +\rho _{BI}$$
(12)
The choice of the scalar field potential $`V(\varphi )`$ is dictated by the requirements discussed in the introductionsahni

$$V(\varphi )=V_0\left[\mathrm{cosh}(\stackrel{~}{\alpha }\varphi /M_p)1\right]^p,p>0$$
(13)
which has asymptotic forms

$$V(\varphi )=\frac{V_0}{2^p}e^{\alpha \varphi /M_p},\stackrel{~}{\alpha }\varphi /M_p>>1,\varphi >0$$
(14)
$$V(\varphi )=\frac{V_0}{2^p}\left(\frac{\stackrel{~}{\alpha }\varphi }{M_p}\right)^{2p}|\stackrel{~}{\alpha }\varphi /M_p|<<1$$
(15)
where $`\alpha =p\stackrel{~}{\alpha }`$. For $`\alpha >\sqrt{2}`$, the exponential potential (14) becomes steep to sustain inflation in the standard cosmology. However, the increased damping due to the quadratic term in the Friedman equation leads to slow roll inflation at high energies ($`V/\lambda _b>>1`$). The number of e-foldings $`𝒩`$, in this model, can be unambiguously fixed to $`𝒩70`$tarun . The COBE normalized value of density perturbations allows to determine the value of the potential at the end of inflation $`V_{end}`$ and the brane tension $`\lambda _b`$tarun .

$$V_{end}^{1/4}=\frac{3.26\times 10^4}{\alpha }M_p$$
(16)
$$\lambda _b=\frac{5.88\times 10^{15}M_p^4}{\alpha ^6}$$
(17)
$`V_{end}`$ and $`\lambda _b`$ are related as $`V_{end}=2\alpha ^2\lambda _b`$. In the scenario based upon reheating via quantum mechanical particle production during inflation, the radiation density is very small, typically one part in $`10^{16}`$ and the ratio of the field energy density to that of radiation has no free parameter to tune. This leads to long kinetic regime which results in an unacceptably large gravity backgroundtarun . The Born-Infeld matter which behaves like radiation (at the end of inflation) has no such problem and can be used for reheating without conflicting with the nucleosynthesis constraint. Indeed, at the end of inflation $`\rho _{BI}`$ can be chosen such that $`\rho _{BI}^{end}<<6\lambda _b`$. We shall confirm that such an initial condition for $`\rho _{BI}`$ is consistent with the nucleo-synthesis constraint. In that case the Born-Infeld matter energy density would scale like radiation at the end of inflation. At this epoch the scale factor will be initialized at $`a_{end}=1`$. The energy density $`\rho _{BI}`$ would continue scaling as $`1/a^4`$ below $`a=a_{end}`$. The scaling would slow down as $`\rho _{BI}`$ reaches $`6\lambda _b`$ which is much smaller than $`V_{end}`$ for generic steep potentials, say for $`\alpha 5`$. Hence $`\rho _{BI}`$ remains subdominant to scalar field energy density $`\rho _\varphi `$ for the entire inflationary evolution. The Born-Infeld matter comes to play the important role only at the end of inflation which is in a sense similar to curvaton. But unlike curvaton, it does not contain any new parameter.

After the brane inflation with exponential potential has ended, the brane effects persist for some time and the transition to kinetic regime is not instantaneous. When the kinetic regime finally commences the temperature of the universe has dropped totarun

$$T_{kin}=T_{end}\left(\frac{a_{end}}{a_{kin}}\right)=T_{end}F_1(\alpha )$$
(18)
where $`F_1(\alpha )=\left(c+\frac{d}{\alpha ^2}\right)`$, $`c0.142`$$`d1.057`$ and $`T_{end}=\left(\rho _{BI}^{end}\right)^{1/4}`$ which will be determined from the nucleo-synthesis constraint. The equality between scalar field matter and radiation (Born-Infeld matter) takes place at the temperature

$$T_{eq}=T_{end}\frac{F_2(\alpha )}{\left(\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI}\right)_{end}^{1/2}}$$
(19)
with $`F_2(\alpha )=\left(e+\frac{f}{\alpha ^2}\right)`$, $`e0.0265`$$`f0.176`$. The fitting formulas (18) and (19) are obtained by numerical integration of equations of motion. We once again emphasize that Born-Infeld matter/radiation does not affect the background spacetime during inflationary stage. The fitting formulas exhibit the post inflationary evolution of $`\rho _\varphi `$ (up to the commencement of radiative regime) which is essentially same as discussed in tarun .

The quantum mechanical production of gravity waves is one of the important aspects of inflationary scenariosg1 ; g2 ; g3 ; g4 ; g5 ; g6 ; g7 ; g8 . The relic gravity waves leave important imprints on the microwave background whose stochastic signature is a challenge to observation. The ratio of energy density in gravity waves to the radiation energy density at the commencement of radiative regime is given by

$$\left(\frac{\rho _g}{\rho _{BI}}\right)_{eq}=\frac{64}{3\pi }h_{GW}^2\left(\frac{T_{kin}}{T_{eq}}\right)^2$$
(20)
where $`h_{GW}`$ is the dimensionless amplitude of gravity waves. From COBE normalization, for $`𝒩70`$

$$h_{GW}^21.7\times 10^{10}$$
(21)
Using equations (18), (19) and (20) we obtain the ratio of scalar field energy density to radiation energy density (sourced by Born-Infeld matter) at the end of inflation

$$\left(\frac{\rho _\varphi }{\rho _{BI}}\right)_{end}=\frac{3\pi }{64}\left(\frac{1}{h_{GW}^2\left(F_1(\alpha )/F_2(\alpha )\right)^2}\right)\left(\frac{\rho _g}{\rho _{BI}}\right)_{eq}$$
(22)
For the nucleo-synthesis constraint to be respected, the ratio of energy density in gravity waves to radiation energy density at equality should obey $`(\rho _g/\rho _{BI})_{eq}0.2`$ and this fixes the ratio of the field energy density to the radiation density at the end of inflation. It follows from equation (22) that for generic steep exponential potential ($`\alpha 5`$) the ratio $`\left(\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI}\right)_{end}10^7`$. Since $`\rho _\varphi ^{end}V_{end}=2\alpha ^2\lambda _b`$, we conclude that $`\rho _{BI}^{end}6\lambda _b`$ for a reasonable value of $`\alpha 5`$. Thus the Born-Infeld matter behaves like radiation after the end of inflation. A comment on the lower bond of $`\alpha `$ is,however, in order. As mentioned in the introduction, ’tracking’ is an important component of the post-inflationary behavior of field energy density $`\rho _\varphi `$ in the model under consideration. During the ’tracking regime’ $`(\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI})`$ is held fixed

$$\frac{\rho _\varphi }{\rho _{BI}+\rho _\varphi }=\frac{3(1+w_{BI})}{\alpha ^2}0.2$$
(23)
The inequality (23) reflects the nucleo-synthesis constraint which requires $`\alpha `$ to be large $`\alpha 5`$ We once again emphasize that in the gravitational particle production scenario, this ratio is a fixed number (independent of $`\alpha `$) and can not be calibrated. The ratio is typically of the order of $`10^{16}`$ allowing the kinetic regime to be excessively long. Since the gravity wave spectrum is acutely sensitive to the post inflationary equation of state, a long duration of kinetic regime results in a gravity wave spectral density which increases with wave number for wavelengths shorter than the comoving horizon scale at the commencement of the radiative regime. In models based upon reheating via inflationary particle production, the ’blue tilted’ energy density of gravity waves can exceed the radiation density violating the nucleo-synthesis constraint. The duration of post-inflationary kinetic regime crucially depends upon the ratio of field energy density to the radiation density at the end of inflation. Interestingly, this ratio is a free parameter in the scenario based upon reheating with Born-Infeld matter and can be conveniently set at the end of inflation. Equation (22) precisely describes the choice of initial value of the ratio of energy densities $`\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI}`$ such that the evolution would respect the nucleo-synthesis constraint. In the Born-Infeld reheating scenario, there is no other free parameter. The only tuning required for a viable evolution is related to the choice of initial condition of the ratio $`\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI}`$. In figure 1, we have plotted this ratio as a function of $`\alpha `$ for steep exponential potential (14). For $`\alpha =5`$$`\rho _\varphi /\rho _{BI}6.6\times 10^6`$ and the ratio saturates nearly at $`6\times 10^6`$ for large values of $`\alpha `$. The radiation density and temperature due to Born-Infeld action can now be estimated to yield (for $`\alpha =5`$)

$$\rho _{BI}^{end}2.77\times 10^{24}M_p^4$$
(24)
$$T_{end}3.14\times 10^{12}GeV$$
(25)
$$T_{eq}2.38\times 10^7GeV$$
(26)
It should be noted that $`T_{eq}`$ is larger by several orders of magnitudes than its counter part in the model based upon reheating via gravitational particle production tarun . From Equations (17) and (24), it is evident that $`\rho _{BI}<<6\lambda _b`$ at the end of inflation for generic steep potential (14). Thus the Born-Infeld matter behaves like a perfect radiation after the inflation has ended. During inflation, as emphasized earlier, the Born-Infeld matter remains subdominant to the scalar field.

As discussed above, the scalar field with exponential potential (14) along with the Born-Infeld matter leads to a viable evolution at early times. We should, however, ensure that the scalar field becomes quintessence at late times. Indeed, the cosine hyperbolic potential (13) changes to power law like behavior near the origin $`\varphi 0`$ giving rise to field oscillations at late times. For a particular choice of power law the average equation of state may turn negativeturner ; sahni

$$w_\varphi \frac{\frac{\dot{\varphi }^2}{2}V(\varphi )}{\frac{\dot{\varphi }^2}{2}+V(\varphi )}=\frac{p1}{p+1}$$
(27)
As a result the scalar field energy density and the scale factor have the following behavior

$$\rho _\varphi a^{3(1+w)},at^{\frac{2}{3}(1+w)^1}.$$

The average equation of state $`w(\varphi )<1/3`$ for $`p<1/2`$ allowing the scalar field to play the role of dark energy. We have numerically investigated the model (with radiation sourced by the Born-Infeld matter) by including the standard cold dark matter. For a particular choice of parameters $`V_0`$, $`\stackrel{~}{\alpha }`$ and $`p`$, the results are displayed in figures 2, 3. We observe that briefly after the inflation has ended, the scalar field enters the kinetic regime and scalar field energy density overshoots the background (radiation). Once the background is overshot, $`\rho _\varphi `$ turns towards it and gets locked ($`w_\varphi =1`$) for some time. Tracking commences in the radiative regime and continues for a substantially long period. In the model described by Eq (13), the scalar field is moving from large values towards the origin. Due to a specific character of the potential, fast oscillations build up in the system as $`\varphi `$ approaches the origin allowing $`\rho _\varphi `$ to scale slower than the background energy density. As a result $`\rho _\varphi `$ moves towards the background, overtakes it and becomes dominant to account for the late time accelerated expansion of the universe. In contrast to the ‘quintessential inflation’ based upon the gravitational particle production mechanism where the scalar field spends long time in the kinetic regime and makes deep undershoot followed by long locking period with very brief tracking, the scalar field in the present scenario tracks the background for a very long time (see figure 2). This pattern of evolution is consistent with the thermal history of the universe. We note that ‘quintessential inflation’ can also be implemented by inverse power law potentials.

Let us summarize below the chronology of main events in the model: (i) For most of the time during inflation driven by the scalar field, the Born-Infeld matter energy density mimics cosmological constant like behavior being sub-dominant to the scalar field energy density $`\rho _\varphi `$. shortly before the inflation comes to end, $`\rho _{BI}`$ drops below $`6\lambda _b`$ and begins to scale as radiation. At the end of inflation, the Born-Infeld radiation density is smaller than $`\rho _\varphi `$ by several orders of magnitudes. (ii) After the inflation has ended, the field energy density scales with the scale factor as $`1/a`$ and brane effects persists for sometimes. Due to the steepness of the potential, the kinetic energy of the scalar field fast increases making the potential energy term in the field evolution equation irrelevant and allowing the commencement of the kinetic regime. (iii) The scalar field continues to be in the kinetic regime for quite sometime and overshoots the background (radiation). (iv) Once this happens, the dominant contribution to the Friedman equation comes from the background. This, in turn, allows $`\rho _\varphi `$ to turn towards the background leading to locking period. (v) The scalar field starts rolling down its potential again. The field $`\varphi `$ which is is evolving from larger values towards the origin is still far away from $`\varphi 0`$ at this stage. The scalar field then joins the scaling solution which is an attractor of the system with exponential potential (14) and continues to track the back ground till $`\varphi `$ approaches the origin. (vi) Once $`\varphi 0`$, fast oscillations build up leading to $`w_\varphi <1/3`$ and enabling the scalar field to play the role of dark energy (quintessence) at late times.

## IV Summary and discussion

In this paper we have discussed a scenario of quintessential inflation based on hybrid brane worlds . In this model radiation originates from the Born-Infeld action while the scalar field action is supposed to be of the ordinal scalar field. It is shown that the scalar field in this scenario plays the dual role of inflaton at early epochs and dark energy at late times. The model successfully overcomes the difficulties associated with the generation of large gravity wave background and is consistent with the nucleo-synthesis constraint. Interestingly the model does not require any additional fine tuning of the parameters.

We should, however, comment on the following important issues associated with the scenario: (i) In our model the contribution to energy density after inflation comes from inflaton as well as from the Born-Infeld matter. The Born-Infeld matter dominates the energy density of the radiation. We have accounted for the scalar field fluctuations only and assumed the validity of our result similar to the single field inflation models. As the Born-Infeld matter dominates the energy density of radiation after inflation, it is pertinent to study also fluctuations in the Born-Infeld matter to check the reliability of primordial density perturbations on super-horizon scales due to inflaton fluctuations. The fluctuations in Born-Infeld matter may or may not be important. We also think that inflation/quintessence may emerge naturally from D-brane physics, say instability of D-$`\overline{D}`$ and so on. We hope to address these issues in our future work. (ii) The ad hoc inclusion of standard cold dark matter and (iii) the absence of baryons in the model. One could introduce an additional scalar field with the same potential as (13) to mimic the cold dark matter. Indeed, the scalar field behaves like pressure less dust for $`p=1`$ (see Eq (27)) and by suitably adjusting the parameters in the potential of the new field, in principal, one could make the field behave like CDM. Regarding the baryons, the Born-Infeld action, as mentioned above, in general also includes Fermi fields. The energy density of Fermions scales as radiation in the early universe and could lead to the whole history of our universe including matter dominated era. These are important issues which, in our opinion, deserve further investigation.

## Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Yun-Song Piao, S. Panda,Takeo Moroi, E. Guendelman and O. Bertolami for useful comments. One of us (MS) thanks V. Sahni ,Parampreet Singh, T Padmanabhan and Kandaswamy Subramania for helpful discussions. The work of TS was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan(No. 13135208, No.14740155 and No.14102004).

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# Production of ϕ Mesons in Au+Au Collisions at 11.7𝐴GeV/𝑐

## I Introduction

The production of $`\varphi `$ mesons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions has been an important subject of study at the AGS, the SPS, and RHIC. The production of the $`\varphi `$ meson, the lightest bound state of strange quarks ($`s\overline{s}`$), is suppressed in ordinary hadronic interactions because of the Okubo-Zweig-Iizuka (OZI) rule OZI . It has been proposed that in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) scenario, strange quarks could be rapidly and abundantly produced via gluon interactions STRANGE . Thus, $`\varphi `$ mesons could be created in a non-conventional way via strange quark coalescence, bypassing the OZI rule. A strong enhancement in $`\varphi `$-meson production would serve as one of the strangeness-enhancement signatures for QGP formation SHOR .

The production of $`\varphi `$ mesons has been measured in $`\mathrm{Si}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at 14.6$`A\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ by E859 at the AGS within a rapidity interval of $`1.2<y<2.0`$ E859PRL . The ratio of the total $`\varphi `$ yield to the $`K^{}`$ yield has been found to be 10% for the uppermost 7% of the charged-particle multiplicity distribution. NA49 at the SPS has measured $`\varphi `$-meson production in $`p+p`$, $`p+\mathrm{Pb}`$, and $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions at a beam energy ($`E_{\mathrm{beam}}`$) of 158$`A\mathrm{GeV}`$ within a rapidity range of $`3.0<y<3.8`$. An enhancement in the ratio of $`\varphi `$ to pion total yields by a factor of $`3.0\pm 0.7`$ has been observed in central $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions relative to in $`p+p`$ interactions NA49PHI . Also at the SPS, NA50 has measured the ratio $`\varphi /(\rho +\omega )`$ as a function of centrality in $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions by fitting the invariant-mass spectrum of muon pairs with $`0<yy_{NN}<1`$ and $`1.5<m_t3`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$ NA50PHI . Both this ratio and the absolute yield of $`\varphi `$’s per participant nucleon have been found to increase significantly with the number of participant nucleons. The STAR experiment has reported on a measurement of the $`\varphi `$ yield at midrapidity in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at center-of-mass energy $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}`$. An increase in the $`\varphi /h^{}`$ ratio with $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ has been observed STARPHI .

Enhancements in the yields of particles with open strangeness have also been observed. At the AGS, $`K^+/\pi ^+`$ ratios have been seen to increase to $``$$`20`$% in central $`\mathrm{Si}+\mathrm{Au}`$ and $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions, from 4–8% in $`p+p`$ collisions E802KPI ; E866KAON ; E917KPI , and the $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}/\overline{p}`$ ratio has been found to increase strongly with centrality in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions E864LBAR ; E917LBAR . At the SPS, the WA97 collaboration has observed enhanced production of $`K`$’s, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$’s, $`\mathrm{\Xi }`$’s, and $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$’s in heavy-ion collisions relative to in $`p+p`$ or $`p+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions WA97S . Measurements from the PHENIX experiment at center-of-mass energy $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}`$ have shown the kaon yield to be more strongly dependent on centrality than the pion yield at midrapidity PHENIXKPI .

The reason for the strangeness enhancement in heavy-ion collisions is not completely understood. The rescattering of hadrons and the conversion of the excitation energy of secondary resonances into strange particles might give rise to strangeness enhancement in a purely hadronic picture RQMD ; ARC ; ART1 . Strangeness enhancement can also be interpreted as a reduction in canonical strangeness suppression from $`p+p`$ to $`A+A`$ reactions in the context of thermal models Thermal . Strangeness enhancement as a function of the number of “grey” protons (a centrality index) has also been seen in $`p+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions, in which a QGP phase is unlikely to contribute E910PRL .

Under the conventional hadronic interactions, there are mainly three scenarios proposed for the production of $`\varphi `$ mesons in nuclear collisions:

* Parton fusion of strange sea quarks PARTONFUSION  or knock-out of $`s\overline{s}`$ pairs KNOCKOUT  from the primary collisions of projectile and target nucleons.
* Secondary baryon-baryon interactions $`BB\varphi NN`$, meson-baryon interactions $`(\pi ,\rho )B\varphi B`$ ART2  and meson-meson interactions $`\pi \rho \varphi `$ RQMDPHI , where $`B=N,\mathrm{\Delta },N^{}`$.
* Secondary kaon-hyperon interactions $`KY\varphi N`$ and kaon-antikaon scattering $`K\overline{K}\varphi \rho `$ in the event of the restoration of chiral symmetry in the hot and dense nuclear fireball ART3 .

With inclusion of secondary meson-baryon and meson-meson interactions, RQMD (Relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics) RQMDPHI  is able to qualitatively describe the increase of kaon yields with centrality measured by E866 E859KAA , though quantitative differences do exist FQWANG .

The different scenarios described above imply different relations between the scaling of $`\varphi `$ production and that of other hadrons, such as kaons and pions, with collision centrality and energy. Hence, a systematic measurement of $`\varphi `$ production in different collisional systems may help to quantify the increase in the overall strangeness production, and, in combination with other measurements of strange and non-strange hadron production, to differentiate between possible mechanisms contributing to the strangeness enhancement Dunlop .

In this paper we report on a measurement of the $`\varphi `$ yield around midrapidity in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and compare it to the yields of pions and kaons.

## II Experimental Details

Experiment 917 took data on $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ reactions at projectile momenta of 6.8, 8.9 and 11.7$`A\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ (corresponding to center-of-mass energies $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 3.83, 4.31, and 4.87 $`\mathrm{GeV}`$, respectively) in the fall of 1996. The identified particles include particles containing strange quarks, such as $`K^+`$, $`K^{}`$, $`\varphi `$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$, and non-strange particles such as $`\pi `$, $`p`$, and $`\overline{p}`$ E917KPI ; E917LBAR ; E917KPKM ; E917PRO ; E917PROC . The experimental apparatus consisted of a movable magnetic spectrometer for tracking and particle identification, and beamline detector arrays for global event characterization. When the data reported in this work were collected, the beam momentum was 11.7$`A\mathrm{GeV}/c`$, an Au target with areal density 1961 mg/cm2 (corresponding to approximately 4% of an interaction length for an Au projectile) was used, and the spectrometer angle was set to either $`14^{}`$ or $`19^{}`$ from the beam axis. The momentum resolution of the spectrometer, $`\delta p/p`$, was about 1% for particles with momentum greater than $`1`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ and increased at lower momentum, up to 2% at $`p=0.6`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$, due to the effect of multiple scattering. The kaon momenta in reconstructed $`\varphi `$ events lay mostly in the range of $`1.0<p<2.0`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$. Event centrality was characterized by the energy of the beam spectators after the interaction as measured in the zero-degree calorimeter (ZCAL), positioned downstream of the target on the beam axis. More details on the detector systems are given in Refs. E917PROC ; E802 ; E917PHD .

The data presented here were collected using a two-level online trigger: a minimum-bias spectrometer-activity trigger (LVL1) followed by a particle-identification trigger (LVL2) which required two charged kaons of either sign or one $`\overline{p}`$ in the spectrometer acceptance. The hardware LVL2 trigger looped over the combinations of drift chamber and TOF hits, and formed combinations consistent with tracks corresponding to particles of given momentum, charge, and particle type using a look-up table LVL2 . The LVL2 trigger increased the live time of the data-acquisition system by essentially the ratio of the rate of vetoable LVL1 triggers to the rate of vetoable LVL1 triggers that were not vetoed. This ratio was known as the LVL2 rejection factor, and could be estimated online. In $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions with a magnetic field of 4 KG and the spectrometer at $`14^{}`$ and $`19^{}`$, typical rejection factors for a $`2K/\overline{p}`$ trigger were $`4.8`$ and $`8.5`$, respectively. By examining data that was taken with the LVL1 trigger and recording the decision of the LVL2 trigger, the inefficiency of the latter was monitored and found to be less than 1% for events fully inside the acceptance. Most of the LVL2-triggered data was background since the trigger was optimized to reject only events that were clearly not of the correct type in order to keep its efficiency near 100%.

A time-of-flight (TOF) system with a typical resolution of 130 ps served to identify pions and kaons up to a momentum of 1.75 $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ with 3 standard deviations of TOF resolution. Above this momentum, the $`3\sigma `$ contours in the ($`p`$, TOF) plane began to overlap. Within this region, particles were identified as kaons only if their TOF was inside the kaon region and outside of the pion region, since 10–30% of the tracks in the overlap region were from pions. A specific correction for the kaon-identification inefficiency from the exclusion of the pion bands in this region of high momenta was implemented in the analysis (see Sec. III.2). Additionally, kaons with momenta less than 0.5 $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ were rejected, in order to avoid the need for large acceptance corrections.

The index of event centrality was obtained from the distribution of the energy deposited in the zero-degree calorimeter, $`E_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$, obtained using a minimum-bias interaction trigger based on the measurement with a Čerenkov counter of the projectile charge after passage through the target. Empty-target runs were periodically taken in order to subtract the background from the ZCAL energy distribution. Assuming a monotonic relation between the energy deposition in the calorimeter and the event centrality such that the most central events correspond to the smallest energy deposition, we divided the data into five centrality bins. The centrality bins are expressed as a fraction of the total cross section for $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions, 6.8 $`\mathrm{b}`$ as evaluated from the parameterizations of Ref. Geer . The cross section for $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions as measured with the minimum-bias interaction trigger is approximately 5.2 $`\mathrm{b}`$, or 77% of the total cross section.

We have attempted to estimate $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$, the mean number of projectile participants, and $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$, the mean number of binary collisions, according to the Glauber model Glauber , using impact parameter cuts corresponding to the centrality range for each bin as listed in Table 1, and an assumed $`p+p`$ inelastic cross section of 30 $`\mathrm{mb}`$. In Experiments 802, 856 and 866 E866KAON , the number of projectile participants has been conventionally estimated from the relation $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}^{\mathrm{ZCAL}}=A_{\mathrm{proj}}(1E_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}/E_{\mathrm{beam}})`$, where $`A_{\mathrm{proj}}`$ is the atomic mass of the projectile, and $`E_{\mathrm{beam}}`$ is the total kinetic energy of the nuclei in the beam before interaction, which was 2123 $`\mathrm{GeV}`$ in the present case. For the purpose of comparison, we have also calculated $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}^{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$ and its uncertainty with a nominal ZCAL energy resolution ($`\sigma _E/E`$) of 3.6% E802ZCAL . All relevant parameters for each centrality bin are listed in Table 1. To facilitate comparison with other experiments we will use $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$ as calculated using the Glauber model for the rest of this paper.

## III Experimental Results

A total of 250 million LVL2-triggered events were analyzed. When the two spectrometer angle settings were combined, the overall acceptance for $`K^+`$$`K^{}`$ pairs covered the region of rapidity $`1.2<y<1.6`$ and transverse mass $`1.0\mathrm{GeV}/c^2<m_t[m_\varphi ^2+(p_t/c)^2]^{1/2}<2.2\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$, as shown in Fig. 1.

The $`\varphi `$ mesons were reconstructed by forming the invariant-mass ($`m_{inv}`$) distribution of identified $`K^+`$$`K^{}`$ pairs and subtracting the combinatorial background, which was obtained by the event-mixing method MIXING . Two kinds of distributions were formed: “same-event” distributions, in which the $`K^+`$’s and $`K^{}`$’s were selected from the same event, and “mixed-event” distributions, in which the individual particles were chosen from different events in the same centrality class to represent the uncorrelated background.

### III.1 Invariant-mass distribution for $`K^+`$$`K^{}`$ pairs

First, we examined the minimum-bias invariant-mass distribution of kaon pairs by fitting the data to a relativistic Breit-Wigner distribution (RBW) convoluted with a Gaussian representing the experimental mass resolution E859PRL ; JDJACKSON . The shape of the background (BG) was obtained from the mixed-event distribution while the normalization was left as a free parameter in the fit. The parameterization is as follows:

$`{\displaystyle \frac{dN_{K^+K^{}}^{\mathrm{same}}}{dm}}`$ $`=`$ $`a{\displaystyle _{m_1}^{m_2}}\mathrm{RBW}(m^{}){\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{1}{2}(\frac{mm^{}}{\sigma _m})^2\right]}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma _m^2}}}𝑑m^{}`$ (1)
$`+`$ $`b{\displaystyle \frac{dN_{K^+K^{}}^{\mathrm{mixed}}}{dm}},`$
where

$`\mathrm{RBW}(m)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{mm_0\mathrm{\Gamma }(m)}{(m^2m_0^2)^2+(m_0\mathrm{\Gamma }(m))^2}},`$ (2)
$`\mathrm{\Gamma }(m)`$ $`=`$ $`2\mathrm{\Gamma }_0{\displaystyle \frac{(q/q_0)^3}{(q/q_0)^2+1}},`$ (3)
$`q_0`$ $`=`$ $`\sqrt{m_0^2/4m_K^2},`$ (4)
$`q`$ $`=`$ $`\sqrt{m^2/4m_K^2},`$ (5)
and where the limits of integration were $`m_1=0.989\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$ and $`m_2=1.252\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$. There were five free parameters in all: the relative normalizations $`a`$ and $`b`$, the peak mass and width parameters $`m_0`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$, and the experimental mass resolution $`\sigma _m`$.

For the minimum-bias data, the same-event invariant-mass distribution of $`K^+`$$`K^{}`$ pairs and the background-subtracted signal distribution corresponding to the first term in Eq. (1) are shown together with the fits in Fig. 2. The values $`m_0=1018.99\pm 0.36`$ $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$, $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0=6.14\pm 2.59`$ $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$, and $`\sigma _m=2.43\pm 1.11`$ $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$ were obtained with $`\chi ^2/\mathrm{dof}=145/167=0.87`$. The fit results for the peak position ($`m_0`$) and width ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$) of the $`\varphi `$ signal are in agreement with the world-average values. The large uncertainty on $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ arises mostly because of a high degree of correlation in the fit between the values for the parameters $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ and $`b`$ (correlation coefficient = $`0.71`$). The value obtained for the experimental mass resolution ($`\sigma _m`$) is also consistent with our estimated value of 2.0 $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$, from Monte Carlo studies and from the width of the peak from $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ decay in the $`p\pi ^{}`$ invariant-mass distribution E917PHD  (the known contribution from the multiple scattering of the kaons in the target in the case of the present measurement was accounted for by additional smearing). It is noted that the result of the fit lies systematically below the data in the invariant-mass region 10–20 $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$ below the $`\varphi `$ peak. We do not have a clear understanding of this effect.

### III.2 Signal counting and extraction of differential yields

Monte Carlo studies confirm that the experimental invariant-mass resolution ($`\sigma _m`$) remains constant ($``$$`2`$ $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$) across the kinematic region of acceptance E917PHD . Given the stable mass resolution and the limited statistics for the division of data into bins in centrality and phase space, the transverse-mass spectra were obtained by counting events in a defined signal window and estimating the number of background events within this window, rather than by integration of the result of the fit with Eq. (1). The details were as follows. The data were divided into subsets for each of the two spectrometer settings and five centrality classes. Same-event and mixed-event pairs for each subset were binned in rapidity and transverse mass ($`\mathrm{\Delta }y=0.2`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_t=0.2\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$), and invariant-mass distributions were obtained for each bin. No corrections were applied to the invariant-mass distributions at this stage—signal extraction was performed on the spectra of raw counts. In each bin, the total number of signal and background counts ($`S+B`$) was taken to be the sum of the counts within a signal window defined as $`1.0040<m_{inv}<1.0355`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$. In units of the natural $`\varphi `$ width, this interval corresponds to approximately $`\pm 3.7\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ about the expected peak position. We then estimated the number of background counts ($`B`$) inside the signal window as the number of counts in the normalized distribution of mixed-event pairs in this same interval. For this purpose, the mixed-event distributions were normalized to have the same area outside of the signal window as the same-event distributions. The final number of signal counts ($`S`$) was obtained by subtracting the background estimated in this way from the total number of events in the signal window. Using this procedure, we were able to obtain estimates of $`S`$ for a total of 88 distributions corresponding to different bins in phase space and centrality for each of the two angle settings.

We use the $`\chi ^2`$ statistic obtained from the Poisson log-likelihood treatment described in Ref. BakerCousins  as an index of the degree of consistency between the same- and mixed-event invariant-mass distributions in the mass region used for normalization. We typically found $`\chi ^2/\mathrm{dof}0.8`$ (for most fits, the number of degrees of freedom—one minus the number of populated bins outside of the signal window in the mixed-event distributions—was 149). In the worst case, we found $`\chi ^2/\mathrm{dof}=177/149`$.

The statistical error on $`S`$ was calculated as $`\sigma _S^2=(S+B)+\sigma _B^2`$. Here, $`(S+B)`$ is the contribution from Poisson fluctuations in the number of total counts in the signal window, and $`\sigma _B`$ was taken to be $`B/\sqrt{B_{\mathrm{out}}}`$, with $`B_{\mathrm{out}}`$ the number of counts in the spectra *outside* the signal window (where same- and mixed-event spectra are normalized to the same integral). As an index of the statistics of the measurement, the values obtained for $`S`$ range from a few counts for bins in phase space near the limits of the spectrometer acceptance, to approximately 100 counts for bins well within the acceptance. Typical values of the signal-to-total ratio, $`S/(S+B)`$, were 0.05–0.30; 74 of the 88 measurements had values of $`S/(S+B)`$ within this interval. The median statistical error for the 88 measurements of $`S`$ was 72%; 57 of the 88 measurements had statistical errors of less than 100%.

Systematic errors on $`S`$ may result if the signal window does not completely include the signal peak. In this case, not only are the tails of the signal peak excluded from the signal count—the equal-area normalization technique will also cause the baseline to be overestimated. Systematic errors on $`S`$ may also arise if the mixed-event distributions do not accurately represent the background in the same-event distributions. Of particular concern is the excess of counts in the mass interval 1.000–1.010 $`\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$ noted in Sec. III.1 and visible in Fig. 2. In the same-event spectra for the individual centrality and phase-space bins, this excess is present to varying degrees. Since we are uncertain of the origin of this excess, its effects must be included in our estimates of the systematic error for the signal count in each bin.

We assign the systematic error on $`S`$ for each bin by varying the width of the signal window from $`\pm 2\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ to $`\pm 5\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$. For window sizes smaller than $`\pm 2\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$, the signal count drops precipitously. For window sizes larger than $`\pm 5\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$, there is very little constraint on the normalization from the low-mass portion of the distribution. In Fig. 3 we show the dependence of $`S`$ on the width of the signal window for minimum-bias distributions in six bins of $`y`$ and $`m_t`$. For each bin, values of $`S`$ are plotted for nine different choices for the signal window, each symmetric about the expected peak position with half-width in units of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ given by the abscissa value. The central point in each plot, corresponding to a window width of about $`\pm 3.7\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$, provides the value of $`S`$ used to obtain the results presented in this work. Some of the point-to-point fluctuation is statistical in nature and is presumably accounted for in the statistical errors associated with each value of $`S`$. In most cases, however, there is a suggestion of an underlying systematic trend. To quantify this trend, we perform a linear, least-squares fit with uniform weights to the nine points for each bin. The results are shown as the straight lines in the figure. For each bin, we quote as the systematic error on $`S`$ the RMS variation of this line over the interval spanned by the first and last points, which is equal to the maximum vertical extent divided by $`\sqrt{12}`$. When applied to each centrality and phase-space bin used for the analysis, this procedure leads to systematic errors for $`S`$ that vary significantly from bin to bin. For the 88 individual measurements of $`S`$, the median systematic error is 16%; 62 of the 88 measurements have systematic errors of less than 30%. In all cases, the statistical errors on $`S`$ are larger than the systematic errors.

The differential yields for each bin in phase space and centrality were then calculated from $`S`$ as

$$\frac{1}{m_t}\frac{d^2N}{dydm_t}=\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Delta }y\mathrm{\Delta }m_t}\frac{S}{f_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}N_{\mathrm{INT}}}\frac{aw}{\mathrm{BR}m_t}$$
(6)
where $`f_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$ is the fraction of minimum-bias interaction triggers satisfying the centrality selection, $`N_{\mathrm{INT}}`$ is the background-subtracted number of minimum-bias interaction triggers collected with the data for normalization purposes, $`a`$ is the geometrical acceptance correction, $`w`$ is the overall correction factor for other experimental effects, $`m_t`$ is the mean value of $`m_t`$ for all pairs in the bin, and $`\mathrm{BR}(\varphi K^+K^{})=49.2`$%.

Apart from the systematic error on $`S`$, the principal source of systematic uncertainty in the yields is from the uncertainty on $`f_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$. Due to radiation damage to the plastic-scintillator materials of the ZCAL, its signal decreased with time. A run-dependent calibration was therefore used, in which the energy of the fragmented-beam peak was recentered at the nominal beam kinetic energy (with corrections for energy loss in the target). These calibrations were performed periodically throughout the running period. The centrality bins were then defined via fixed cuts on the calibrated ZCAL energy. However, $`f_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$ exhibited residual variation as a function of running time. The resulting contributions to the systematic errors on the yield measurements are estimated to range from about $`5\%`$ in the most central bin to $`10\%`$ for the most peripheral bin.

The geometrical acceptance, $`a`$, and many of the contributions to the weight factor $`w`$, were calculated using a GEANT-based Monte Carlo simulation implementing a realistic detector configuration E917PHD . The value of $`a`$ used in Eq. (6) is the average value for $`\varphi K^+K^{}`$ events in the phase-space bin of interest. The weight factor $`w`$ was calculated as follows for each centrality and phase-space bin. Corrections for kaon decays in flight, the single-particle tracking inefficiency, hadronic interactions, multiple scattering in the spectrometer, momentum cuts, and the kaon-identification inefficiency were evaluated using the Monte Carlo, separately for each track in each pair. An additional correction for the single-track tracking efficiency in the presence of background hits on the drift chambers was evaluated by inserting found tracks into random events. This occupancy correction was then parameterized by the hit multiplicity in the chambers and applied for each track; the resulting correction was typically 20–40%. The individual correction weights for each track and from each of the above sources were then multiplied, together with an additional correction for a two-track opening-angle cut (evaluated for each pair), to obtain the overall pair weight, $`w`$. The value of $`w`$ in Eq. (6) is the average value of $`w`$ for all pairs in the same-event distribution of interest. The systematic errors associated with $`a`$ and $`w`$ are estimated to be no larger than 5%, arise mainly from the statistics of the samples used to obtain the weight factors, and do not significantly affect the results.

The final systematic errors on the individual yield measurements are calculated as the quadrature sum of the fractional systematic errors on $`S`$ (for each measurement), on $`f_{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$(for each centrality bin), and on $`a`$$`w`$ (constant). In general, the dominant contribution is from the systematic uncertainty on $`S`$. For the 88 individual differential yield measurements, the median overall systematic error is 20%; 60 of the 88 measurements have systematic errors of less than 30%, and 75 of the 88 have systematic errors of less than 50%. In all cases, the statistical errors are larger than the overall systematic errors; for 73 of the 88 measurements, the statistical errors are more than twice as large as the overall systematic errors.

Experimental results from both the $`14^{}`$ and $`19^{}`$ settings of the spectrometer were in all cases consistent within statistical errors, and were therefore combined for the presentation of the transverse-mass spectra, resulting in the 53 individual differential yield measurements plotted in Fig. 4.

### III.3 Transverse-mass spectra and rapidity distributions

The transverse-mass spectra for the five centrality bins are shown in two bins of rapidity, $`1.2<y<1.4`$ and $`1.4<y<1.6`$, with an $`m_t`$ bin size of 0.2 $`\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$, in Fig. 4. For the $`m_t`$ bins where the acceptance from $`14^{}`$ and $`19^{}`$ data sets overlap, the individual measurements from each of the data sets agree to within statistical errors, and the weighted average of the two measurements is presented. The full error shown includes both statistical and systematic contributions; the contribution from statistics alone is indicated by the cross bars. The total errors are calculated as the quadrature sum of the statistical and systematic errors.

An exponential parameterization with two parameters, rapidity density ($`dN/dy`$), and inverse slope ($`T`$), was used to fit the transverse-mass spectra:

$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2\pi c^4m_t}}{\displaystyle \frac{d^2N}{dm_tdy}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{dN/dy}{2\pi (Tm_0c^2+T^2)}}`$ (7)
$`\times \mathrm{exp}\left[{\displaystyle \frac{(m_tm_0)c^2}{T}}\right].`$
This function gave a good fit to the data with $`\chi ^2/\mathrm{dof}1`$ in all cases. The values obtained for the rapidity density ($`dN/dy`$) and inverse-slope parameters ($`T`$) are plotted as functions of rapidity and centrality in Fig. 5 and are listed in Tables 2 and 3. The statistical and systematic contributions to the error were evaluated by performing the fits with and without the systematic contribution included in the errors. The systematic error due to uncertainties in the overall normalization is excluded from the systematic error estimate for $`T`$.

As a function of centrality, the rapidity density shows a strong systematic increase, while the inverse slope increases more mildly. Within the rapidity range covered by the measurement, there seems to be no strong rapidity dependence for $`T`$.

The fiducial yield is the sum of the values $`dN/dy\times \mathrm{\Delta }y`$ for the two rapidity bins covering the interval $`1.2<y<1.6`$ and is plotted as a function of $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$ (calculated from a Glauber model as explained in Sec. II) in Fig. 6. When normalized to $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$, this quantity exhibits a steady increase with increasing centrality. This implies that the fiducial yield of $`\varphi `$’s increases faster than linearly with $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$. It is noted that the increase with centrality is slightly more significant (the effect is on the order of 4% in the slope of a linear fit) if the fiducial yields are plotted against $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}^{\mathrm{ZCAL}}`$. Thus, we observe an enhancement in $`\varphi `$-meson production in central events. This is similar to what has been previously observed for kaon production E866KAON . In $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions at the SPS, NA50 has also observed an increase in the yield of $`\varphi `$’s per participant nucleon ($`n_\mathrm{p}`$) as a function of $`n_\mathrm{p}`$ NA50PHI , though the NA50 data show more evidence of saturation of this quantity in the most central collisions than do our results.

## IV Discussion

In this section, we compare the measured inverse slopes ($`T`$) and rapidity densities ($`dN/dy`$) for the $`\varphi `$ to those of the other hadrons and explore their dependence on centrality and beam energy.

### IV.1 Transverse-mass spectrum of the $`\varphi `$; comparison to other species

In the most central bin ($`\sigma /\sigma _{\mathrm{tot}}=\text{0–5}\%`$), the inverse-slope parameter is determined to be 260$`\pm `$37 $`\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$ around midrapidity. As motivated by hydrodynamic models hydroPRC , the inverse-slope parameters for different particle species are expected to scale with species mass for particles that participate in the collective transverse flow. It is interesting to see whether the inverse slope for $`\varphi `$ mesons fits into the systematic trend observed for the other hadrons. However, two known effects complicate the interpretation.

The first is that the cross sections for $`\varphi `$ interactions in the collision medium are expected to be small. The OZI rule inhibits elastic scattering of the $`\varphi `$ on nucleons and non-strange mesons and resonances. Elastic-scattering cross-sections are dominated by Pomeron exchange and are expected to be on the order of 1 $`\mathrm{mb}`$ (see SHOR  and references therein). In particular, from studies of $`\varphi `$ photoproduction, total cross sections for the interaction of $`\varphi `$’s with nucleons are estimated to be 8–12 $`\mathrm{mb}`$ over the range of $`\varphi `$ kinetic energies from a few hundred $`\mathrm{MeV}`$ up to several $`\mathrm{GeV}`$, and dominated by OZI-allowed absorptive processes—elastic scattering of $`\varphi `$’s on nucleons accounts for about 1 $`\mathrm{mb}`$ of this cross section PHICROSS . It might therefore be expected that $`\varphi `$’s decouple rather early from the nuclear fireball, which is composed of nucleon resonances, pions, and non-strange meson resonances. If this were the dominant effect, the $`\varphi `$ inverse slope ($`T`$) would reflect the original “temperature” when the $`\varphi `$’s are produced, without the enhancement from collective transverse flow developed in the late hadronic stages Xu\_PRL . In this case, $`T`$ for the $`\varphi `$’s would be lower than that observed for other hadrons of similar mass (for example, $`p`$’s).

On the other hand, when the $`\varphi `$ is detected via its decay into kaons, the rescattering of the daughter kaons from $`\varphi `$’s that decay inside the nuclear fireball would generate a relative depletion in the $`\varphi `$ yield at low $`p_t`$. This explanation has been proposed SHURYAKQM99  to explain the difference in the values of $`T`$ for $`\varphi `$ mesons obtained by experiments NA49 and NA50, which observed the $`\varphi `$ via its decay into $`K^+`$$`K^{}`$ and $`\mu ^+\mu ^{}`$ final states, respectively. Given the short lifetime of the $`\varphi `$ ($`c\tau =45`$ fm/$`c`$), one might expect that this effect can give rise to a significant depletion in the $`m_t`$ spectrum only at low $`m_t`$. To illustrate, we have performed a simple simulation in which $`\varphi `$’s are generated at the center of a “fireball” according to an exponential $`m_t`$ distribution with $`T=250\mathrm{MeV}/c^2`$, and any $`\varphi `$’s that decay within 7 fm of the origin are suppressed. For $`m_tm_0>0.5\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$ the resulting depression of the $`m_t`$ spectrum is nearly uniform; a deficit in the spectrum of more than 10% is noted only for $`m_tm_00.25\mathrm{GeV}/c^2`$, *i.e.*, only at the edge of the E917 acceptance. (A calculation performed with RQMD for $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions at the SPS gives similar results JJD .) Conceivably, however, in-medium effects could broaden the $`\varphi `$ enough to cause a more significant fraction of $`\varphi `$’s to decay inside the fireball, leading to an increase in the apparent value of $`T`$ in fits to the $`m_t`$ spectra (see Ref. KF  for an example with reference to the NA49 and NA50 data).

For the comparison of the transverse-mass spectra for various particle species, we choose to use the mean transverse mass, $`m_t`$. This is because a variety of forms are used to fit and parameterize the transverse-mass spectra in the existing measurements of $`\pi ^+`$ E866PIPRO , $`K^+`$ E866KAON , $`p`$ E866PROD ; E917PROC , $`d`$ E866PROD , and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$ E917LBAR  production at midrapidity in central $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS, including Boltzmann, Boltzmann plus exponential, and $`m_t`$-scaled exponential forms, in addition to the simple single-exponential form used to fit the $`m_t`$ spectra for $`\varphi `$’s in this work. In all but two of the reports referenced above, $`m_t`$ is derived from the slope parameters for the chosen parameterization of the $`m_t`$ spectra, and quoted in place of the slope parameters themselves. The exceptions are the $`K^+`$ and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$ data. In Ref. E866KAON , the $`m_t`$ spectra for kaons are fit with exponential distributions, and values of $`T`$ are reported. We convert to $`m_t`$ using the expression

$$m_t_{\mathrm{exp}}=\frac{m_0^2c^4+2m_0c^2T+2T^2}{m_0c^2+T}.$$
(8)
We use the same expression to obtain $`m_t`$ from the value of $`T`$ obtained from the fit to the $`m_t`$ spectrum for the $`\varphi `$ presented in this work. In Ref. E917LBAR , the $`m_t`$ spectra for $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$’s are fit with Boltzmann distributions,

$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2\pi c^4m_t}}{\displaystyle \frac{d^2N}{dm_tdy}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{dN/dy}{2\pi (T_\mathrm{B}m_0^2c^4+2T_\mathrm{B}^2m_0c^2+2T_\mathrm{B}^3)}}`$ (9)
$`\times m_tc^2\mathrm{exp}\left[{\displaystyle \frac{(m_tm_0)c^2}{T_\mathrm{B}}}\right],`$
and values for $`T_\mathrm{B}`$ are quoted. We convert to $`m_t`$ using the expression

$$m_t_{\mathrm{Boltz}}=\frac{m_0^3c^6+3m_0^2c^4T_\mathrm{B}+6m_0c^2T_\mathrm{B}^2+6T_\mathrm{B}^3}{m_0^2c^4+2m_0c^2T_\mathrm{B}+2T_\mathrm{B}^2}.$$
(10)
The values of $`m_tm_0`$ for $`\varphi `$ mesons, together with the corresponding values for $`\pi ^+`$’s, $`K^+`$’s, $`p`$’s, $`d`$’s, and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$’s are plotted as a function of species mass in Fig. 7. We note that the centrality selection differs somewhat from species to species in the available data: top $`3\%`$ for $`\pi ^+`$, $`p`$ (E866), and $`d`$; top $`5\%`$ for $`p`$ (E917), $`\varphi `$ and $`K^+`$; and top $`12\%`$ for $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$. The rapidity coverage varies similarly: for the $`\pi ^+`$ data it is $`1.3<y<1.4`$; for the $`K^+`$ and $`\varphi `$ data it is $`1.4<y<1.6`$, for the $`p`$ and $`d`$ data it is $`1.4<y<1.5`$, and for the $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$ data it is $`1.0<y<1.4`$. (For reference, $`y_{NN}=1.61`$ for 11.7$`A\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions.) The dashed line in Fig. 7 shows a fit to the values for $`m_tm_0`$ using the form of Eq. (8) with $`T=a+bm_0c^2`$, so that $`a`$ and $`b`$ are the free parameters of the fit. Assuming that it is qualitatively valid to describe the midrapidity $`m_t`$ spectra for the various species by exponential inverse-slope parameters, this fit illustrates the trend expected for a linear relationship between inverse slope ($`T`$) and particle mass ($`m_0`$), as motivated by hydrodynamic models.

The value of $`m_tm_0`$ for the $`\varphi `$ falls slightly below the systematic trend observed for the other particles, but less so than for $`\overline{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$’s. There may be some suggestion of an effect from early freeze-out of the $`\varphi `$ and late development of at least some of the transverse flow, as described in Ref. Xu\_PRL . However, the significance of this observation is limited by the precision of the measurement.

### IV.2 Centrality dependence of $`\varphi `$ production; comparison to other species

As mentioned in Sec. I, processes such as $`pppp\varphi `$ are suppressed by large threshold energies and the OZI effect. Thus a naive expectation assuming ordinary hadronic interactions is that if an enhancement in $`\varphi `$ production were observed in heavy-ion collisions at AGS energies, this enhancement would result from secondary collisions, *e.g.* via channels such as $`K^+\mathrm{\Lambda }\varphi p`$ or $`K^+K^{}\varphi \rho `$ ART3 . If this were in fact the case, increasing $`KY`$ and $`K\overline{K}`$ combinatorics would bring about an increase of the $`\varphi /K`$ ratio for central collisions.

On the other hand, the proposed “re-arrangement” PARTONFUSION  or “shake-out” KNOCKOUT  of an intrinsic $`s\overline{s}`$ component of the nucleon wave function in the non-perturbative regime provides a mechanism for $`\varphi `$ production in $`\mathrm{N}+\mathrm{N}`$ interactions that bypasses the effects of OZI suppression. If the $`s\overline{s}`$ component of the nucleon wave function were negatively polarized, the fact that, at threshold, the reaction $`pppp\varphi `$ must proceed with the $`pp`$ initially in the $`{}_{}{}^{3}S_{1}^{}`$ spin state would imply that this mechanism should be particularly important at near-threshold energies (see Ref. DISTO  and references therein, especially ELLIS2 ). Indeed, the DISTO collaboration has observed that in $`p+p`$ collisions at $`\sqrt{s}=2.90\mathrm{GeV}`$, only 83 $`\mathrm{MeV}`$ above threshold, the $`\varphi /K^{}`$ ratio is about unity, such that $`\varphi `$ production represents an important contribution to the $`K^{}`$ yield at these energies DISTO .

Along these lines, a possible mechanism has been proposed to explain overall strangeness production in $`\mathrm{N}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions within the framework of the additive quark model ADM . According to this proposal, strange particles are born as strange-quark pairs from binary collisions of the projectile and target nucleons, with a probability proportional to the number of interacting constituent projectile quarks KADIJA . In $`p+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at 17.5 $`\mathrm{GeV}/c`$, E910 has shown that the production of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$’s and $`K_S`$’s increases with the estimated number of binary collisions, $`\nu `$, suffered by the incident proton E910PRL . For $`\nu 3`$, the increase in the yields is faster than expected from scaling of $`p+p`$ data by the number of total participants (*i.e.*, $`N_{p+\mathrm{A}}/N_{p+p}=\frac{1}{2}(1+\nu )`$), although bounded from above by linear scaling with $`\nu `$ (*i.e.*, $`N_{p+\mathrm{A}}/N_{p+p}=\nu `$).

If the same mechanism were responsible for the observed increase in $`\varphi `$ production with centrality in $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions, we would expect to observe similar scaling behavior in our data. Specifically, we would expect approximately constant numbers of hadrons bearing strange quarks to be produced per binary collision. In the following, we therefore compare the yield of $`\varphi `$’s to the yields of pions and kaons as a function of centrality. The yields of pions and kaons were obtained by the E866 collaboration from $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the same beam energy used for the present measurement E866KAON ; E866PIPRO .

As seen from the left panel of Fig. 8, the $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratio of fiducial yields shows a rise toward central collisions, which signals an enhancement in the production of $`\varphi `$ mesons relative to that of non-strange $`\pi `$ mesons in central collisions. This enhancement is also clearly suggested by Fig. 6, since pion production is known to mainly come from resonance decay and secondary rescattering and scales linearly with $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$. Due to the fact that the plotted points represent ratios of fiducial yields, some care should be taken when interpreting the exact form of the dependence. We note that this increase in the $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratio is qualitatively similar to the increase in the $`K/\pi `$ ratio with centrality observed by E866 in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS E866PIPRO .

We next compare the degree of enhancement in the yields of $`\varphi `$’s and $`K`$’s, which both contain $`s`$ quarks. We use the yield of $`K^+`$ to characterize the overall kaon production because the E866 data indicate that the $`K^{}/K^+`$ ratio is about 0.15 and independent of centrality. In the right plot of Fig. 8, the ratio of fiducial yields $`\varphi /K^+`$ is plotted as a function of centrality, and shows no substantial variation. This implies that both $`\varphi `$ and $`K^+`$ (or $`K^{}`$) possess a similar degree of enhanced production toward central collisions at AGS energies. As estimated from linear fits to the $`\varphi /K^+`$ ratios as a function of $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$, an increase of up to 50% for the ratio in the most central bin cannot be definitively ruled out within a $`1\sigma `$ range of the fit errors. However, any centrality dependence of the $`\varphi /K`$ ratios appears to be weak.

To look for scaling behavior similar to that observed in $`p+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions by E910, we examine the dependence of the $`\varphi `$ yields in our data on the mean number of binary collisions, $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$. (Estimation of $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ is discussed in Sec. II; the values of $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ for each centrality bin are given in Table 1.) The fiducial $`\varphi `$ yield normalized to $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ is plotted versus $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ in Fig. 9. The dependence of the fiducial $`\varphi `$ yield on $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ is consistent with scaling proportional to $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$.

While the rapidity coverage of our measurement does not allow us to make a precise statement about the absolute value of the $`\varphi `$ yield, it is possible to make an informed guess about the width of the $`\varphi `$ rapidity distribution. Both E859 E859PRL  and NA49 NA49PHI ; NA49KPI  have observed that the Gaussian width of the $`\varphi `$ rapidity distribution is very similar to those of the $`K^+`$ and $`K^{}`$ rapidity distributions. In central $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS, the Gaussian widths of the rapidity distributions for $`K^+`$ and $`K^{}`$ are $``$$`0.9`$ and $``$$`0.7`$, respectively E866KAON ; E859KAA . The narrow $`K^{}`$ width has been attributed to the higher threshold and more restricted phase space for $`K^{}`$ production. Since the thresholds for $`K^{}`$ and $`\varphi `$ production in $`p+p`$ collisions are very similar, we assume that the $`\varphi `$ and $`K^{}`$ have Gaussian rapidity distributions with approximately equal widths in central $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions. We then estimate that our fiducial yield corresponds to about 20% of the total yield. Using the parameterization described in Appendix A for the $`\varphi `$ yield in $`p+p`$ collisions as a function of center of mass energy, $`\sqrt{s}`$, the yield of $`\varphi `$’s per binary collision in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions is about 50% of the $`\varphi `$ yield in $`p+p`$ collisions at this energy. This observation seems contrary to the usual expectation of enhanced strangeness production in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions. We discuss this point further in Sec. IV.3.

Using E866 data on the total yields of $`K^+`$ and $`K^{}`$ normalized to $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$, a similar scaling proportional to $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ is observed. It appears as if the mechanisms for the production of $`K^+`$’s, $`K^{}`$’s, and $`\varphi `$’s all have a similar dependence on the centrality of the collisions, and this dependence is consistent with a scaling with the number of binary collisions, $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$. This observation suggests that hard binary collisions might play an important role in strangeness production in heavy-ion collisions.

Our observation that $`\varphi `$ and kaon production scale similarly and faster than linearly with $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$ therefore provides an essential test of the details contained within rescattering models. The rescattering model that suggests the importance of contributions from $`KY`$ and $`K\overline{K}`$ collisions in the increase of $`\varphi `$ production in central $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions ART3  can be ruled out; if such contributions were dominant, combinatorial considerations would lead to the expectation that $`\varphi `$ production should increase faster than kaon production with centrality. This is incompatible with our observation that $`\varphi `$ and kaon production show similar scaling with centrality.

### IV.3 Dependence of $`\varphi /\pi `$, $`\varphi /K^+`$, and $`\varphi /K^{}`$ ratios on $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ in $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ and $`p+p`$ reactions

In order to further explore the mechanism responsible for the approximate scaling of the $`\varphi `$ yield with $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ observed in our data, we compare our results with other measurements of $`\varphi `$ production in heavy-ion collisions at different reaction energies.

The excitation functions of the $`\varphi /\pi `$, $`\varphi /K^+`$, and $`\varphi /K^{}`$ ratios in central heavy-ion collisions are shown in Figs. 1011, and 12. The four points correspond to $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS (this measurement, $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=4.87\mathrm{GeV}`$E866KAON ; E866PIPRO , $`\mathrm{Si}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS ($`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.39\mathrm{GeV}`$E859PRL ; E802KPI ; E859KAA , $`\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}`$ collisions at the SPS ($`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=17.27\mathrm{GeV}`$NA49PHI ; NA49KPI , and $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at RHIC ($`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130\mathrm{GeV}`$STARPHI ; PHENIXKPI . These plots must be interpreted with some care. Most obviously, the collisional system is different in each case; in particular, the various particle yields are not guaranteed to scale in the same way when passing from the $`\mathrm{Si}+\mathrm{Au}`$ system to the heavier systems. In addition, the points for $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS and RHIC represent fiducial-yield ratios (the AGS point is for the fiducial yield over $`1.2<y<1.6`$, and the RHIC point is for the central unit of rapidity), while the other two points are ratios of yields over all phase space. Nor have we applied any corrections in the comparisons with $`p+p`$ collisions to take into account the isospin averaging of yields from $`p+p`$, $`n+n`$, and $`p+n`$ collisions E866KAON ; E859KAA ; ISOSPIN . Nevertheless, two observations can be made.

Our first observation is that the $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratios for $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions are notably enhanced with respect to their values for $`p+p`$ collisions for all points except at the highest energy in Fig. 10. In $`p+p`$ collisions, $`\varphi /\pi `$ increases with $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$, in large part because of the larger production threshold for $`\varphi `$ mesons. In heavy-ion collisions, the $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratios are enhanced by factors of 2–3, at least up to SPS energies, but seem to show the same energy dependence observed in $`p+p`$ collisions, at least up to SPS energies. Such an enhancement in the central $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions could be interpreted as due to the different scaling behaviors of $`\varphi `$ and $`\pi `$ with centrality. As discussed in Sec. IV.2, the yield of $`\varphi `$’s scales with $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ while that of $`\pi `$’s scales with $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$. The ratio of $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ to $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$ is around 1 in peripheral collisions, which are similar to $`p+p`$ collisions, and becomes larger than 1 in central collisions. At RHIC, the $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratio for central $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions is about the same as that from the parameterization of the $`p+p`$ data. It might be speculated that the primary production channels for $`\varphi `$’s and/or $`\pi `$’s at RHIC energies are different from those at AGS and SPS energies.

The second observation is that the $`\varphi /K`$ ratios for $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions are only marginally enhanced with respect to their values for $`p+p`$ collisions, and show relatively little variation as a function of energy as seen in Fig. 11 and Fig. 12. Our parameterization of the $`p+p`$ cross section for $`\varphi `$ production suggests that the $`\varphi /K^{}`$ ratio increases as $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ approaches the threshold value from above for the reaction $`pppp\varphi `$. The $`\varphi /K^{}`$ ratios in heavy-ion data seem to follow the energy dependence observed in $`p+p`$ collisions rather reasonably.

It is interesting to see if the data points from other systems and energies obey the scaling with $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ as well. The ratio $`\varphi /N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$ for central $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions at the AGS and SPS is plotted in Fig. 13. For the comparison, we are forced to assume a value for the $`\varphi `$ rapidity width for our measurement. A width of $`\sigma _y=0.71`$ equal to the measured $`K^{}`$ width is used, as explained in the previous section, and we plot our point with an additional 20% systematic uncertainty corresponding to a range of values for $`\sigma _y`$ from 0.6 (overlap of $`K^+`$ and $`K^{}`$ rapidity distributions) to 0.9 ($`K^+`$ rapidity distribution). The RHIC point is not included in this comparison, because there is no reasonable way to extrapolate the fiducial yield to all of phase space. The ratio $`(\varphi /N_{\mathrm{coll}})_{\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}}/(\varphi /N_{\mathrm{coll}})_{p+p}`$ is consistent with $``$$`0.5`$–0.7 for all three points from the AGS and SPS. Our comparison is by no means precise. However, it does seem that the yield of $`\varphi `$’s per binary collision, modulo the effects of threshold and center-of-mass energy dependence, is approximately constant across the three collisional systems studied. Furthermore, instead of there being an enhancement in the $`\varphi `$ yield per binary collision in heavy-ion collisions, this double ratio is less than 1. This might reflect the effect of $`\varphi `$ absorption in the nuclear fireball, as the inelastic cross section of the $`\varphi `$ on nucleons ($``$$`8`$–10 $`\mathrm{mb}`$) is a significant component of the total interaction cross section ($``$$`8`$–12 $`\mathrm{mb}`$PHICROSS ; PHICROSSABSORP .

## V Summary

In conclusion, we have studied $`\varphi `$ production in $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at 11.7$`A\mathrm{GeV}/c`$ around midrapidity as a function of collision centrality. The yield per projectile participant shows a steady rise toward central collisions. This enhanced production in central collisions is stronger than that of non-strange $`\pi `$ mesons as seen from the increasing $`\varphi /\pi `$ ratio with centrality. The ratios $`\varphi /K^+`$ and $`\varphi /K^{}`$ are approximately constant with $`N_{\mathrm{pp}}`$. The yield of $`\varphi `$’s, like the yields of $`K^+`$ and $`K^{}`$, is seen to scale with $`N_{\mathrm{coll}}`$, the number of binary collisions, and this observation is incompatible with predictions from some rescattering models of $`\varphi `$ production, in which $`\varphi `$ production increases faster than kaon production with centrality due to combinatorial considerations. Finally the yield of $`\varphi `$’s per binary collision in $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions is about 50–70% of the $`\varphi `$ yield in $`p+p`$ collisions at AGS and SPS energies. That the yield of $`\varphi `$’s per binary collision in $`\mathrm{A}+\mathrm{A}`$ collisions is smaller than that in $`p+p`$ collisions might signal the effect of $`\varphi `$ absorption by nucleons in heavy-ion collisions.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contracts with ANL (No. W-31-109-ENG-38), BNL (No. DE-AC02-98CH10886), MIT (No. DE-AC02-76ER03069), UC Riverside (No. DE-FG03-86ER40271), UIC (No. DE-FG02-94ER40865), and the University of Maryland (No. DE-FG02-93ER40802); by the National Science Foundation under contract with the University of Rochester (No. PHY-9722606); and by the Ministry of Education and KOSEF (No. 951-0202-032-2) in Korea.

## Appendix A Parameterization of $`\varphi `$ production as a function of $`\sqrt{s}`$ in $`p+p`$ collisions

The $`\varphi `$ yield in $`p+p`$ collisions provides a useful benchmark for the interpretation of $`\varphi `$ yields in heavy-ion collisions. There are various existing measurements of the inclusive total cross section for $`\varphi `$ production in $`p+p`$ collisions for $`5<\sqrt{s}<60`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}`$ NA49PHI ; DISTO ; PHIPP  that can be extrapolated to the values of $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ for which heavy-ion data exist. (Note that the point at $`\sqrt{s}=2.90\mathrm{GeV}`$ from Ref. DISTO , while technically an exclusive measurement in the $`ppppK^+K^{}`$ channel, is also an inclusive measurement, since no other channels with a $`\varphi `$ or $`K^{}`$ in the final state are kinematically allowed at this energy.) We have fit these measurements with a form used to parameterize results on vector-meson production cross sections in $`p+p`$ collisions obtained from one-pion exchange calculations SIBIRTSEV  and the Lund String Model CASSING :

$`\sigma (pp\varphi X)`$ $`=`$ $`a(1x)^bx^c`$
$`x`$ $``$ $`s_{\mathrm{thresh}}/s`$
$`s_{\mathrm{thresh}}`$ $`=`$ $`8.38\mathrm{GeV}^2`$ (11)
The results of our fit are shown in Fig. 14. We obtain $`a=74_{24}^{+36}\mu \mathrm{b}`$, $`b=2.05_{0.18}^{+0.22}`$, and $`c=1.56_{0.27}^{+0.30}`$. For comparison with heavy-ion data, we obtain yields by dividing the $`\varphi `$ cross sections for each value of $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ by the inelastic $`p+p`$ cross section. For $`\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}`$ collisions at the AGS, $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=4.87`$ $`\mathrm{GeV}`$, and our parameterization of the $`p+p`$ data gives a yield of $`0.00169\pm 0.00042`$ at this energy.

For $`K`$ and $`\pi `$ production in $`p+p`$ reactions, we use the multiplicity parameterizations in Ref. KPIPP . The smallest $`\sqrt{s}`$ for the ranges of parameterization for $`\pi `$, $`K^+`$and $`K^{}`$ are 3.0, 2.98, and 5.03 $`\mathrm{GeV}`$, respectively.


text:
# An atom mirror etched from a hard drive

Present address: \]Laboratoire PHMC / Ecole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau cedex, France

## Abstract

We describe the fabrication of an atom mirror by etching of a common hard drive, and we report the observation of specular retroreflection of 11 $`\mu `$K cesium atoms using this mirror. The atoms were trapped and cooled above the hard drive using the mirror magneto-optical trap technique, and upon release, two full bounces were detected. The hard drive atom mirror will be a useful tool for both atom optics and quantum computation.

Laser cooling and trapping techniques have made possible the preparation of extremely cold samples of atoms Metcalf and van der Straten (1999). Atom optics employs elements such as mirrors, lenses, gratings and beam-splitters to manipulate these cold atoms in a fashion similar to the familiar photon optics. The advent of the atom laser Mewes et al. (1997) has enhanced the importance of developing atom optical elements. In particular, atom mirrors—surfaces that reflect atoms—play a crucial role in the field of atom optics, and it is of keen interest to develop mirrors that are simple to fabricate yet highly specular. In this Letter we demonstrate a straightforward technique to produce large area, high resolution permanent-magnetic structures on flat, rigid, and inexpensive substrates.

Several types of atom mirrors have been fabricated using evanescent light fields Savalli et al. (2002), dynamic magnetic fields Arnold et al. (2002), and static magnetic fields Hinds and Hughes (1999). Evanescent mirrors repulse atoms from a prism surface using a potential created by a blue-detuned light field. Although magnetic mirrors cannot generally be modulated as easily as evanescent mirrors, they do offer many advantages: passive operation, compactness (no laser access is needed), and much larger repulsive areas.

Magnetic mirrors employ a sheet of alternating current or magnetization to create an exponentially increasing potential near the mirror surface Opat et al. (1992). To lowest order, this potential is proportional to $`B_0e^{ky}`$. The surface field, $`B_0`$, sets the maximum atom energy that can be reflected, and the spatial period of the current or magnetization, $`a=2\pi /k`$, determines the amount of time the atoms interact with the mirror. The magnetic mirror approximates a perfectly flat mirror as $`B_0`$ increases and $`a`$ decreases. For example, if $`B_0=1`$ kG and $`a=1`$ $`\mu `$m, a cesium atom in the $`6^2S_{1/2}`$ $`F=4`$, $`m_F=4`$ state will be reflected when dropped from a height of 0.4 m, and will only interact with the mirror for 5 $`\mu `$s if dropped from 2 cm.

Mirrors made from serpentine patterns of wires can produce time-dependent reflection potentials. However, they have not been fabricated with periods smaller than 10 $`\mu `$m, and the power dissipated by the small wires requires cooling by liquid nitrogen and pulsed operation Johnson et al. (1998). Sinusoidal magnetization of audio-tape, floppy disks, and videotape can produce magnetic mirrors with magnetization periods down to 12 $`\mu `$Hinds and Hughes (1999). Mirrors made from millimeter-sized arrays of permanent magnets have been demonstrated, as have mirrors produced by 1 to 4 $`\mu `$m periodic structures fabricated by sputtering ferromagnetic material onto a grooved substrate patterned by electron-beam lithography Sidorov et al. (2002).

We recently fabricated a magnetic mirror by etching a common hard drive, and we have used this mirror to retroreflect a cold cloud of $`10^6`$ cesium atoms. Hard drives offer several advantages for making and using atom mirrors. The common hard drive provides a large surface area of thin magnetic film whose surface is specifically designed to be very flat, smooth, and rigid. Furthermore, the film’s remnant magnetic field and coercivity can be as large as 7 kG and 3 kG, respectively Comstock (1999). An atom mirror could in principle be fabricated with a 2 $`\mu `$m periodicity over the entire surface of the hard drive. Old or discarded hard drives may be used: an Apple hard drive from the mid-1990’s was used for the experiment presented here.

We fabricate the mirror by etching 2 $`\mu `$m wide, $`100`$ nm deep trenches into a 1 cm2 section of the surface of the hard drive. These 100 nm trenches extend past the magnetic layer to form a periodic array of 1 $`\mu `$m wide, 30 nm thick, and 1 cm long stripes of cobalt alloy (see Fig. 1). The cobalt alloy is granular, which enhances the coercivity and allows us to magnetize the material in plane and parallel to the short axis of the magnetic strips. We do not know the exact materials and thicknesses of the layers of the proprietary hard drive. However, etching $`100`$ nm is sufficient to remove the magnetic layer.

Standard photolithography is used to create the etch mask. After cutting the hard drive into 2 to 3 cm2 sections, positive photoresist (TSMR-8900 from Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co.) is spun onto the cleaned hard drive surface for 40 s at 4200 rpm. A 15 s exposure followed by 65 s in the developer (NMD-W 2.38%) maps the photomask lines into the resist. The sample is ion milled with argon in a inductively coupled plasma (ICP) system. We etch for 8 minutes at a forward power of 100 W, ICP power of 400 W, and an argon flow of 40 sccm. The remaining photoresist is removed with acetone and, if necessary, a soft swab. To erase the hard drive’s bits and magnetize it as a mirror, we insert the hard drive section into the field of an 8 kG electromagnet whose field is parallel to the surface and perpendicular to the magnetic stripes.

The magnetic field from the etched hard drive, with in-plane magnetization, $`M_0`$, parallel to the short axis of the magnetic stipes, is analogous to a periodic sheet of alternating in-plane magnetization $`+M_0/2`$ and $`M_0/2`$. In the infinite array limit, the magnetic field above the surface is

$$B^2=B_1^2e^{2ky}+2B_1B_3\text{cos}(2kx)e^{4ky}+B_3^2e^{9ky}+\mathrm{},$$
(1)
where $`B_1=\mu _0M_0(1e^{kb})/\pi `$, $`B_3=\mu _0M_0(1e^{3kb})/3\pi `$, and $`b=`$ 30 nm is the thickness of the magnetic layer. The field has no components in the z-direction, and rotates with a period equal to $`a`$ in the x-y plane. Cesium atoms in the $`F=4`$, $`m_F=4`$ state, which has the largest weak-field seeking magnetic moment, would have to be dropped from a height of 25 cm to penetrate to a height at which the second term in the expansion is equal the first, so to a good approximation the field may be written as

$$BB_1e^{ky}+B_3e^{3ky}\text{cos}(2kx).$$
(2)
For our hard drive mirror, $`B_1`$ is equal to 2 to 4 kG depending on the specific cobalt alloy. When $`a=1`$ $`\mu `$m, the ratio of the first harmonic term to the purely exponential term for a cesium atom dropped from a height of 2 mm (20 mm) is $`1\times 10^6`$ ($`1\times 10^3`$) at the turning point $`y=0.8`$ $`\mu `$m ($`y=0.4`$ $`\mu `$m).

The etched hard drive used for the experiment has $`a3`$ $`\mu `$m and $`c1`$ $`\mu `$m resulting in a ratio of magnetic layer to gap that is approximately 1:2. Figures 2(a) and (b) show 20 $`\mu `$m wide AFM and MFM scans of the hard drive surface. The trenches in the AFM scan are dark, and the light to dark variation of magnetic strips shows the north and south poles of the magnetization. Figure 2(c) shows a 20 $`\mu `$m cross-section of the MFM scan: peaks represent the north and south poles. To describe the field above our etched hard drive, Eqn. 2 can be modified to account for the deviation from a 1:1 width ratio by multiplying $`B_1`$ by $`\text{sin}(\pi c/a)`$ and $`B_3`$ by $`\text{sin}(3\pi c/a)`$. In our device, the ratio of $`c/a1/3`$ decreases the $`B_1`$ term by 0.9, but causes the corrugation term to nearly vanish.

The atom mirror is placed facing upwards in a vacuum chamber pumped to $`5\times 10^9`$ Torr. In contrast to the experiments that use a standard magneto-optical trap (MOT) to trap and cool the atoms $`2`$ cm above the mirror, we use the mirror MOT technique to collect the atoms 1.5 to 4 mm above the surface Reichel et al. (1999). A MOT requires the zero of a magnetic quadrupole field to be centered at the intersection of six circularly polarized laser beams coming from all cardinal directions. To satisfy this configuration near the hard drive surface, two 1 cm diameter beams of opposite circular polarization reflect at 45 from the 1 cm2 etched region (see Fig. 3). A retroreflected beam is positioned perpendicular to the 45 beams and grazes the surface of the hard drive. Aligning the axis of the quadrupole field with one of the 45 beams completes the mirror MOT configuration. The trapping lasers, each with an intensity of 4 mW/cm2 and 1 cm wide, are detuned by 10 MHz from cesium’s $`F=4`$, $`F^{}=5`$ cycling transition. A repumping beam tuned to the $`F=3`$, $`F^{}=4`$ transition is superimposed onto both the grazing beam and a 45 beam. The atoms are loaded from a thermal vapor.

In previous experiments using a perfectly reflecting gold mirror, we have been able to trap $`2\times 10^6`$ cesium atoms in a mirror MOT and cool them to 3 $`\mu `$K. One might expect trapping and cooling to be much less effective with the etched hard drive due to its poor qualities as an optical mirror: the reflectivity is only $`50`$%, it is a good optical grating, and the magneto-optical Kerr effect degrades the circularity of the reflected 45 beams. Nevertheless, we have been able to collect $`1\times 10^6`$ atoms and sub-doppler cool them to 11 $`\mu `$K. Achieving this low temperature is crucial because the atoms released directly from the mirror MOT, at a temperature of $`120`$ $`\mu `$K, expand too quickly and become too diffuse to detect by the time they reach the hard drive surface.

The poor optical reflectivity of the mirror does slightly complicate the sub-doppler cooling procedure; however with careful zeroing of the magnetic field it is still possible to achieve polarization-gradient cooling to 11 $`\mu `$K in a (downwards) moving reference frame. The atoms are optically pumped into the $`F=4`$, $`m_F=4`$ Zeeman sub-state just before being dropped, and we apply a 100 mG bias field parallel to the magnetic stripes in order to maintain alignment of the atomic spins while they are falling/bouncing.

We have been able to detect two full bounces of the atoms from the hard drive atom mirror. Figures 4(a) and (b) show data from five runs of the experiment. The top panel shows the mean position of the atoms above the hard drive surface as a function of time. Superimposed is a curve depicting the expected trajectory of a particle falling under gravity and bouncing from a hard wall. The slope of a line fit to the lateral expansion of the falling atom cloud provides a measure of the atoms’ rms velocity. A non-specular mirror would heat and diffusely scatter the reflected atoms as they bounce, resulting in a sharp increase of the cloud expansion rate. We made a linear fit to pre-reflection ($`t<15`$ ms) data in each of the data sets, and deviation from this line, post-reflection, would be evidence of non-specularly. The dashed segment demarcates the region of unfitted data, and we do not see any increase or offset of the residuals in this post-reflection region: to within the experimental resolution, we do not detect any deviation from specular reflection.

We have realized a specular atom mirror built by etching a common hard drive. Magnetization periodicity of 3 $`\mu `$m has been achieved, and we believe it would be straightforward to reduce this to 2 $`\mu `$m with photolithography and to $`1`$ $`\mu `$m using a large area electron-beam writer. The hard drive atom mirror is compact, passive, relatively simple to fabricate, and possesses a large remanent magnetic field. Moreover, it has several desirable properties for applications beyond simple reflection of atoms. The hard drive’s large coercivity should allow one to use wires fabricated directly on its surface to augment the mirror’s ability to manipulate atoms. Likewise, electric pads could be printed on the surface. These pads would allow state-independent forces to act in concert with the state-dependent forces from the mirror’s magnetic field to perform quantum logic gates necessary for quantum computation Schmiedmayer et al. (2002). The mirror can trap cold atom gases in 2D, and can act as an adjustable grating when used in conjunction with a magnetic bias field Hinds et al. (1998); Rosenbusch et al. (2000). Large area mirrors can be fabricated, and it seems possible that these mirrors could be useful for guiding or confining cold neutrons Vladimirskiî (1961). As hard drive platters are expected to have good surface flatness and substrate rigidity, it may be possible to create 2D waveguides and other devices by holding an opposing pair of atom mirrors a few microns apart.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors thank the Roukes group and Marko Loncar. This work was supported by the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program under Grant No. DAAD19-00-1-0374.