A review on φ meson production in heavy-ion collision

Abstract

The main aim of the relativistic heavy-ion experiment is to create extremely hot and dense matter and study the QCD phase structure. With this motivation, experimental program started in the early 1990s at the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) followed by Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and recently at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These experiments allowed us to study the QCD matter from center-of-mass energies (sNN) 4.75 GeV to 2.76 TeV. The φ meson, due to its unique properties, is considered as a good probe to study the QCD matter created in relativistic collisions. In this paper we present a review on the measurements of φ meson production in heavy-ion experiments. Mainly, we discuss the energy dependence of φ meson invariant yield and the production mechanism, strangeness enhancement, parton energy loss, and partonic collectivity in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Effect of later stage hadronic rescattering on elliptic flow (v2) of proton is also discussed relative to corresponding effect on φ meson v2.