Properties of light mesons in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions
The PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is designed for studying the new state of nuclear matter, which is presumably created in central ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy nuclei: the so-called quark-gluon plasma. Light mesons are an important tool in this research. This paper reviews the recent experimental results on the light meson invariant yields, nuclear modification factors, and the yield ratios for the vector and pseudoscalar mesons in the p + p, d + Au, and Au + Au collisions at the energy of √sNN = 200 GeV.