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The presently approved heavy ion programme at the CERN SPS ends in the fall of year 2000. A renewed activation of the heavy ion beam after 2001, even if only for a few weeks, will only happen if the interested community presents a strongly motivated case, addressing research topics in which CERN can play an important and competitive role. A continuation of the current quark-gluon plasma search, with means and goals similar to those of the present experiments, is not possible due to the concentration of resources on the LHC experiments.
A realistic option for a new and unique research program with heavy ion beams at the SPS is the measurement of open charm production (inclusive and/or exclusive). Various groups have looked into the feasibility of such experiments and one Letter of Intent has already been submitted to the SPS Committee (SPSC). See the web pages http://www.cern.ch/HIPS/charm and http://www.cern.ch/NA6i for details.
The SPSC will discuss the relevance of a new SPS heavy ion program in its meeting of March 2000. In view of that discussion, we are organising a workshop on "Charm production in nucleus-nucleus collisions", at CERN, on Thursday and Friday, 2-3 December 1999.
The main goal of this workshop is to review and discuss the motivation for measuring charm production in heavy ion collisions, in order to put on solid grounds the interest of such a program. In particular, we will try to define, as clearly as possible, specific open questions in our understanding of strong interaction physics in general and of heavy ion physics in particular which can be addressed by such a program, and to clarify the level of experimental accuracy required for decisive answers. We would also like to review issues that are currently not well established and which could be clarified by p-A runs, as the measurement of the A-dependence of open charm and charmonia states (including the chi_c).
The topics to be addressed in the workshop include, among others:
The workshop will start on Thursday afternoon, December 2nd,
14:00, in conference room 40-S2-A01. The transparencies shown at the
Workshop will be scanned and made available on the web. The workshop
will be broadcasted via the virtual room SUN of VRVS (see the web page
http://vrvs.cern.ch for details).
14:05-14:35 Helmut Satz
14:45-15:15 Laurent Capelli
16:00-16:30 Marek Gazdzicki
16:45-17:10 Peter Levai
17:20-17:45 Johann Rafelski
17:55-18:10 J. Aichelin
18:15-18:30 M. Gorenstein
Program
Thursday, December 2, 1999 - Conference Room 40-S2-A01
14:00 Opening
Charmonium versus open charm production in nuclear collisions
Slides (HTML)
Recent results on intermediate mass dimuon production
Slides as a 0.4 Mbyte PS file and
in HTML
Present searches and future plans of open charm measurements in NA49
Slides (HTML)
Charm hadron production via quark coalescence at SPS
Slides (HTML)
Diffusion and drag of charmed particles
Slides as a 0.2 Mbyte PS file and
in HTML
Charmonium suppression in p-A collisions
Slides as a 0.25 Mbyte PS file and
in HTMLFriday, December 3, 1999 - Conference Room 40-S2-A01
09:00-09:40 Xin-Nian Wang
Where could the charm come from at the SPS?
Slides (PS file)
10:00-10:40 Ramona Vogt
A-dependence of open charm production and gluon shadowing
Slides (HTML)
11:30-12:00 Ruben Shahoian
Inclusive open charm measurements with dimuons at the SPS
Slides as a 4.2 Mbyte PS file and
in HTML
12:15-12:35 Peter Braun-Munzinger
Open charm production rates and experimental backgrounds
Slides (HTML)
14:00-14:40 Ralf Averbeck
Perspectives for charm measurements at RHIC
Slides as a 21.5 Mbyte PS file and
in HTML
14:50-15:30 Short contribution by Karel Safarik
16:00-18:00 Panel discussion
Goals and potentials of an open charm program at the SPS