Identified Light and Strange Hadron Spectra at √sNN = 14.5 GeV with STAR at RHIC BES I

Abstract

With the recently measured Au+Au collisions at √sNN=14.5 GeV, RHIC completed its first phase of the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program. The main motivation of the BES program is the search for a conjectured critical point and possible first order phase transition. Amongst the various collision energies of 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, and 39 GeV, that have been previously presented by STAR, collisions at 14.5 GeV will provide data set in the relatively large chemical potential gap between the 11.5 and 19.6 GeV center-of-mass energies. In this contribution, we report new STAR measurements of Au+Au at √sNN=14.5 GeV that include identified light particle RCP and spectra, as well as measurements of the strange hadrons (K0s, A, ξ, and ω). The spectra from both light and strange particles cover a significant range of the intermediate transverse momentum (2 < pT < 5 GeV/c) in all beam energies. We will discuss the physics implications of these observables and whether hadronic or partonic interactions dominate the collision dynamics at a given center-of-mass energy.