ϕ meson production in Au+Au and p+p collisions at sNN=200GeV

We report the STAR measurement of ϕ meson production in Au+Au and p+p collisions at sNN=200GeV. Using the event mixing technique, the ϕ spectra and yields are obtained at mid-rapidity for five centrality bins in Au+Au collisions and for non-singly-diffractive p+p collisions. It is found that the ϕ transverse momentum distributions from Au+Au collisions are better fitted with a single-exponential while the p+p spectrum is better described by a double-exponential distribution. The measured nuclear modification factors indicate that ϕ production in central Au+Au collisions is suppressed relative to peripheral collisions when scaled by the number of binary collisions (〈Nbin〉). The systematics of 〈pt〉 versus centrality and the constant ϕ/K− ratio versus beam species, centrality, and collision energy rule out kaon coalescence as the dominant mechanism for ϕ production.