Multihadron production dynamics exploring the energy balance in hadronic and nuclear collisions

Abstract

The relation of multihadron production in nucleus-nucleus and (anti)proton-proton collisions is studied by exploring the collision-energy and centrality dependencies of the charged particle mean multiplicity in the measurements to date. The study is performed in the framework of the recently proposed effective-energy approach which, under the proper scaling of the collision energy, combines the constituent quark picture with Landau relativistic hydrodynamics counting for the centrality-defined effective energy of participants. Within this approach, the multiplicity energy dependence and the pseudorapidity spectra from the most central nuclear collisions are well reproduced. The study of the multiplicity centrality dependence reveals a new scaling between the measured pseudorapidity spectra and the calculations. By means of this scaling, referred to as energy-balanced limiting fragmentation scaling, one reproduces the pseudorapidity spectra for all centralities. The scaling elucidates some differences in the multiplicity and midrapidity density centrality dependence obtained at RHIC and LHC. These findings reveal an inherent similarity in the multiplicity energy dependence from the most central collisions and centrality data. Predictions are made for the mean multiplicities to be measured in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. © 2016 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the »http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/» Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.