Speaker
Description
In ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, a state of deconfined quarks and gluons, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), is created. As the system cools, it evolves into a hot and dense hadronic medium. Precise measurements of the spectral functions of low-mass vector mesons (ρ, ω, φ ) in the dilepton channel can provide information on possible restoration of chiral symmetry. As part of the ALICE upgrades for the LHC Run 3 period, a new silicon pixel detector, the Muon Forward Tracker (MFT) has been installed covering the forward pseudorapidity region 2.5 < η < 3.6. The inclusion of the MFT in the muon track reconstruction leads to an improvement in mass resolution compared to Run 2, and is expected to allow for effective heavy-flavor background separation, enabling the measurement of ω and φ dimuon invariant mass distributions. In this presentation, we report on the analysis of ω and φ mesons in the dimuon decay channel at forward rapidity in pp collisions at √s = 13.6 TeV. In particular, we demonstrate that the inclusion of MFT information in the muon-track reconstruction improves the mass resolution of the ω and φ mesons, particularly at low pT. We also present the signal-to-background ratio as a function of the dimuon invariant mass obtained with the MFT and the statistical significance of the ω and φ yield as a function of pT. These studies represent a step toward future measurements of the ω and φ meson production cross sections, which will provide an essential vacuum baseline for investigating possible in-medium modifications in Pb-Pb collisions.
