Application of FHCal for Heavy-Ion Collision Centrality Determination in MPD/NICA Experiment

Abstract

Two approaches related to the centrality determination in heavy-ion Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) experiments, using charge-particles multiplicity in Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and the energy deposition in Forward Hadron Calorimeter (FHCal) are discussed. The main features of the FHCal are the fine transverse segmentation and the beam holes in the center of the calorimeters. Leaking the heavy non-interacting fragments (spectators) leads to ambiguity in the dependence of energy deposition in the FHCal on the collision centrality. However, the calorimeter transverse segmentation allows one to measure the energy distributions in each of the FHCal modules and to construct combined observables to resolve the problems associated with the beam hole. The comparison of these approaches in the collision centrality measurements is discussed.

Keywords

• NICA
• heavy-ion
• centrality
• MPD
• FHCal