First $D^0+\overline{D}^0$ measurement in heavy-ion collisions at SPS energies with NA61/SHINE

Abstract

The measurement of open charm meson production provides a tool for the investigation of the properties of the hot and dense matter created in nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies. In particular, charm mesons are of vivid interest in the context of the study of the nature of the phase-transition between confined hadronic matter and the quark-gluon plasma. Recently, the experimental setup of the NA61/SHINE experiment was upgraded with the high spatial resolution Vertex Detector which enables the reconstruction of secondary vertices from open charm meson decays. In this presentation the first $D^0$ meson yields at the SPS energy regime will be shown. The analysis used the most central 20\% of Xe+La collisions at 150A GeV/c from the data set collected in 2017. This allowed the estimation of the corrected yields (dN/dy) for $D^0+\overline{D}^0$ via its $π^{+/-} + K^{-/+}$ decay channel at mid-rapidity in the center-of-mass system. The results will be compared and discussed in the context of several model calculations including statistical and dynamical approaches