Centrality dependence of charged hadron production in deuteron+gold and nucleon+gold collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV

Understand

We present transverse momentum (p_T) spectra of charged hadrons measured in deuteron-gold and nucleon-gold collisions at \sqrts = 200 GeV for four centrality classes.

• Nucleon-gold collisions were selected by tagging events in which a spectator nucleon was observed in one of two forward rapidity detectors.
• The spectra and yields were investigated as a function of the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, \nu, suffered by deuteron nucleons.
• A comparison of charged particle yields to those in p+p collisions show that the yield per nucleon-nucleon collision saturates with \nu for high momentum particles.