A New Two-Component Model for Hadron Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Yin, Xuejiao; Zhu, LiLin; Zheng, Hua

doi:https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/6708581

Advances in High Energy Physics

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Research Article | Open Access

Volume 2017 | Article ID 6708581 | https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/6708581

A New Two-Component Model for Hadron Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Xuejiao Yin,¹LiLin Zhu,¹and Hua Zheng²

Academic Editor: Ming Liu

Received16 Feb 2017

Accepted19 Apr 2017

Published23 May 2017

Abstract

Using the experimental data from the ALICE program on the centrality dependence of the transverse momentum () spectra in Pb+Pb collisions at TeV, we show that the double-Tsallis distribution and the generalized Fokker-Planck (FP) solution cannot describe the spectra of pions, kaons, and protons from central to peripheral collisions in the entire region, simultaneously. Hence, a new two-component distribution, which is a hydrodynamic extension of the generalized FP solution accounting for the collective motion effect in heavy-ion collisions, is proposed in order to reproduce all the identified particle spectra. Our results suggest that the particle production dynamics may be different for different particles, especially at very low region.

1. Introduction

The advent of a new generation of high energy colliders, such as Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has launched a new era in the study of the hadron production. Plenty of pp, pA, and AA collisions data have been accumulated, which allow one to study the nature of the final particle production. The particle transverse momentum spectra carry important information about the dynamics of particle production and evolution process of interacting system formed in high energy nuclear collisions. In the past decade, the attempt to understand the particle production mechanism by different theoretical and phenomenological approaches has been a great success [1–22]. Generally, the theoretical investigation of hadron production in heavy-ion collisions is operated into different camps, characterized by the regions of transverse momenta of the produced hadrons. At low statistical hadronization and hydrodynamical models are generally adopted [1–3], whereas at high jet production and parton fragmentation with suitable consideration of medium effects in perturbative QCD (pQCD) are the central themes [4–6]. The approaches have been studied essentially independent of each other with credible success in interpreting the experimental data for different regions, since their dynamics are decoupled.

At intermediate and lower recombination or coalescence subprocess (ReCo) in heavy-ion collisions has been found to be more relevant, which has successfully explained various experimental data [7–9]. Beside the ReCo model, there are also other phenomenological models proposed to describe the hadron production. In [10, 11], within the two-component model, treating the particle spectra as a summation of an exponential (Boltzmann-like) and power-law distributions was suggested. However this model could not describe the charged particle production at very high in central Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV. So an additional power-law term was added, which was explained by the peculiar shape of the nuclear modification factor . On the other hand, due to the effect of the collective motion in large colliding system, the relativistic hydrodynamics are usually adopted to consider the particle production, instead of thermodynamic methods. Therefore, the charged particle spectra could be consisting of a hydrodynamic term and two power-law terms suggested as well in [10],where is the transverse flow rapidity and the radial flow velocity is parametrized as with for the surface velocity. is a parameter related to the transverse size of the particle distribution in space and is the distance of the particle from the origin of the coordinate system in the transverse plane. is the transverse mass and is the rest mass of particle. and are the modified Bessel functions. Hence, there are eight free parameters , , , , , , , and , which add the difficulty to fit, although (1) can describe the charged particle spectra very well in central Pb+Pb collisions. Other forms of multicomponent models, which were derived from multisource thermal model [12–14], were also applied to the particle transverse momentum spectra produced from low energy to high energy heavy-ion collisions.

Besides, the Tsallis distribution, which was proposed about three decades ago [23], has been widely applied to describe final particle production with great success by the theorists and experimentalists [15–22]. It was derived in the framework of nonextensive thermodynamics,where is the entropic factor, which measures the nonadditivity of the entropy, and is the temperature. The two parameters carry important information of the observed colliding system. is the energy of the particle. is the chemical potential which could be assumed to be 0, when the colliding energy is high enough, and the chemical potential is much smaller than the temperature. If the self-consistent thermodynamical description is taken into account, the effective distribution is needed [16, 17, 19]. One should bear in mind that even though different versions of Tsallis distribution were adopted by different groups in the literature, it has established the excellent ability to describe the hadron spectra in a large region in pp, pA, and AA collisions. Here we will try to pursue this approach to the identified particles in the noncentral Pb+Pb collisions at TeV. Furthermore, for comparison, we will also discuss the particle spectra in the frame of Fokker-Planck equation and try to get some information about the hadron production during the evolution of the colliding system.

The paper is organized as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we show our results of particle spectra from Pb+Pb collisions with a double-Tsallis distribution as well as the generalized Fokker-Planck solution, respectively. A new two-component distribution which is consisting of the hydrodynamic term and generalized Fokker-Planck solution is proposed in Section 4. In Section 5, a detailed comparison among the three distributions is shown. Finally, a summary is given in Section 6.

2. A Double-Tsallis Distribution

In our earlier work [21], it has been demonstrated that a single Tsallis distribution could not fully reproduce the whole structure of the observed particle spectra in central Pb+Pb collisions at TeV. Therefore, a double-Tsallis distribution could be proposed,where is the transverse energy. When the rest mass of particle , (3) becomes the same as the double-Tsallis distribution proposed in [16] for charged particles, which are dominated by pions. But when is large, such as kaons, protons, and antiprotons, the mass effect should be taken into account. The double-Tsallis distribution (3) is assumed by hadron yields stemming from two parts: soft and hard yields. Due to jet-medium interactions, it is almost impossible to distinguish the origin of the final particles. Thus, the yields from minijets are included in either the soft or hard contribution. Comparing with the single Tsallis distribution, three more parameters are increased, which allow one to fit the charged particle spectra with up to 100 GeV/c in the most central Pb+Pb collisions [16]. Recently, the transverse momentum spectra of charged pions, kaons, and protons up to GeV/c have been measured in Pb+Pb collisions at TeV using the ALICE detector for six different centrality classes [24]. Hence, it is the right time to investigate whether the double-Tsallis distribution can describe the identified particle production at both central and noncentral collisions.

As shown in Figure 1, (3) reproduces the data for pions and kaons very well, while for protons the situation is different. Firstly, it is remarkable that the spectrum of protons at the centrality 60–80% could be described by (3) very well, in agreement with the conclusion in our previous work [20]. The peripheral collisions in AA are more similar to the p+p collisions and the single Tsallis distribution can fit all the particle spectra produced [20]. Secondly, one could also notice that, in Figure 1(c) when GeV/c, the lines are much larger than the data for central and less central collisions. The existence of difference is not surprising. Compared with pions and kaons, the spectra of protons demonstrate different behaviors at low . This could be because the particle production dynamics are different for different particles. On the one hand, a cascade particle production mechanism was proposed in p+p collisions. The heavier particles are more likely to be produced at the beginning while the light particles can be produced at all times [20]. On the other hand, in the quark recombination models [7–9], mesons are formed by combining a quark and an antiquark while baryons by three quarks. Because different numbers of (anti)quarks participate in forming the particles, the structures of their spectra must be different. In this sense, our investigation results urge more studies on particle production mechanisms.

(a)

(b)

(c)

The fitting parameters can be found in Table 1. One can see that the two Tsallis distributions in (3) account for different regions of the particle transverse momentum spectrum. The first one dominates in the low region and is close to the exponential form, resulting in large value of , while the second one is responsible for high tail. Generally speaking, the temperature-like parameter can represent the temperature of the particles and it decreases from central to peripheral collision for pions, kaons, and protons. One should bear in mind that the discrepancy observed on the fit for protons at low (see Figure 1(c)) definitely affects the value. for kaons is a little bit smaller than the one for protons at the same centrality and both are larger than that of pions. This observation is similar to the case in p+p collisions [20, 22].

3. The Generalized Fokker-Planck Solution

The Fokker-Planck equation has a wide amount of applications in different fields. For instance, FP equation has been solved to study the time evolution of income distributions for different classes in a country [25], the rapidity spectra for net proton production at RHIC, SPS, and AGS [26], and the interaction of nonequilibrated heavy quarks with the quark-gluon plasma expected to be formed in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies [27–30]. The general form of Fokker-Planck equation is [27]The coefficients and are the drift and diffusion terms, respectively. Here, represents the time while is the variable studied, which we have chosen as , based on the same consideration as in (3). Assuming and , one could obtain the stationary solution of (4)which fulfills the condition and depends on the three parameters , , and . When or , from (5), we can getOn the other hand, when or , (5) becomes

The asymptotic behaviors of are consistent with those of transverse momentum distribution of the final particles in heavy-ion collisions, which exhibits roughly a power-law distribution for large , whereas it becomes purely exponential for small . Actually, in [21], we have proposed a formula for the first time, which is similar to (5), to fit all the particle spectra at central collisions in Pb+Pb at TeV but the power of in the denominator of (5) was fixed and changed from 2 to 4. We realize that we need to generalize the formula proposed in [21] in order to describe the spectra of identified particles at both central and noncentral collisions. The generalized form of the solution of Fokker-Planck equation isThere are five parameters , , , , and kinetic temperature . This distribution interpolates between the exponential law for low and the power-law for high . A crossover between the two regimes takes place at . In Figure 2, we redo the fitting with (8). The corresponding parameters are listed in Table 2. One can see that the power for pions, kaons, and protons is close to 4 at central collisions, in agreement with our previous work [21] where is fixed. We also find that decreases from central to peripheral collisions for all the particles. As we have mentioned above, is equal to 2 in the stationary solution of FP equation. Therefore, it could be interesting to explore the time evolution of this power by solving the FP equation to look for more insights. But this is out of the scope of this paper. Since the exponent of power-law term in the denominator of (8) is the product of and when , this means they are coupled. Actually, Table 2 shows that and have opposite behaviors versus centrality for pions, kaons, and protons. The parameter for pions and kaons increases while it decreases for protons with the centrality. The results show us that we cannot interpret the parameter as the temperature of the final particles and it must be correlated with the other fitting parameters.

(a)

(b)

(c)

In Figure 2, we can see that the fits are better than the ones with (3), especially for protons. But for pions, the solid lines are a little bit lower than the data at GeV/c for central collisions. In log scale the difference is invisible. We will show this in linear scale at Section 5. This leads us to figure out another method to illustrate the spectra of pions at very low region. At the same time, it also should be able to reproduce kaons and protons production. In other words, we hope that there is a universal distribution, which could describe the spectra of the different final particles for the whole region.

4. A New Two-Component Distribution

Recognizing that both the double-Tsallis distribution and the generalized Fokker-Planck solution are not able to fully reproduce the observed structure at low region, it is argued that one should realize that the soft and hard particles have different production mechanisms. We need to figure out how to make the fit for pions better at very low since (8) can fit kaons and protons very well; see Figures 2(b) and 2(c). The bulk of low- particles originates from the “quark-gluon soup” formed in the heavy-ion collision and has an exponential distribution, while the high- tail accounts for the minijets that pass through the hot medium, a process which can be described in pQCD. When a large colliding system is formed, one should also take the effects of the “collective motion” into account [31]. Thus, in heavy-ion collisions multiparticle production is usually considered in terms of relativistic hydrodynamics, contrary to the widely used thermodynamic approaches for pp, p, and collisions [23]. Therefore, we introduce a hydrodynamic extension to the generalized Fokker-Planck solution (8) to improve the fit for pions in Figure 2(a).

As shown in Figure 3(a), we present an example of the use of this method for pions at six different centralities in Pb+Pb collisions using the following formula:The results are indeed encouraging, even though two more parameters, and , are added. As shown in Table 3, from the hydrodynamic term at all centralities are below the phase transition temperature 5–160 MeV for QGP. This could be explained by considering that the expanding system cools down until it reaches the freeze-out stage. The parameters from the generalized FP solution have the same behavior as the ones in Table 2 and they are correlated as well. The solid lines include the total contributions from the hydrodynamic and generalized Fokker-Planck terms in (9). To get a clear picture of the two terms, we show them in different color lines for 0–5% in Figure 3(b). To show the difference clearly a ratio of the hydrodynamic term over the generalized Fokker-Planck term is plotted in the inset of Figure 3(b) as a function of . It indicates that the generalized Fokker-Planck term is absolutely dominant at GeV/c, while the contribution from the hydrodynamic term definitely cannot be ignored at very low region. When the contribution from hydrodynamic term is extremely small, (9) is the same as (8) and it can reproduce the particle spectra for kaons and protons. The results are similar to Figures 2(b) and 2(c) and we do not need to repeat them.

(a)

(b)

5. Discussion

Generally speaking, the results shown in the previous sections indicate that the three different methods, which are the double-Tsallis distribution (3), the generalized Fokker-Planck solution (8), and the new two-component distribution (9), can describe the experimental data. But we want to understand which distribution is the optimal choice. To have a clearer picture, we evaluate the degree of agreement of the fitted results with the experimental data. One can calculate the ratio between the experimental data and the fitted results, which is defined as

Figure 4 shows the ratio , calculated by (3), (8), and (9), respectively, as a function of the transverse momentum in linear scale for the centrality 0–5%. In Figure 4(a), one can see that all points for pions produced in most central collisions from (9) are in the range from −0.1 to 0.1, while the relative discrepancies from (3) and (8) are large at low region. For kaons, (3) and (8) have the similar fitting power as shown in Figure 4(b), and the deviation of the fitting results from data is less than 10%, while, for protons, Figure 4(c) establishes that (3) is not good for low region, which can be easily seen from Figure 1(c).

(a)

(b)

(c)

For the sake of the comprehensive comparison, we should also check the relative discrepancies of the three equations at other centralities. Here, we only plot the results for the centrality 60–80%, which are shown in Figure 5. Except for few points, the relative discrepancies of the three equations for pions, kaons, and protons are in good agreement with the data exhibiting deviations lower than 10%. Remarkably, the fluctuations for pions, kaons, and protons are much smaller than those for the centrality 0–5%. In other words, the three distributions nicely agree in describing the particle spectra produced in peripheral collisions, which are similar to p+p collisions.

(a)

(b)

(c)

Based on these analyses, we can conclude that (9), which is composed of a hydrodynamic term and the generalized Fokker-Planck solution, is the best one among the three distributions and it could well describe the spectra from central to peripheral collisions for pions, kaons, and protons. The proposed hydrodynamic extension (9) of (8) slightly modifies the description of the experimental data for pions at low region, which also gives insight to the particle production mechanism.

6. Summary

In this paper, we have made a detailed study of the double-Tsallis distribution, the generalized Fokker-Planck solution, and the new two-component distribution, by fitting the transverse momentum spectra of pions, kaons, and protons in Pb+Pb collisions at TeV. The double-Tsallis distribution can fit the particle spectra except the big deviation observed for proton at GeV/c for central and less central collisions, while the generalized Fokker-Planck solution is not able to describe the spectra of pions at very low . Therefore, we propose a new two-component distribution as a hydrodynamic extension of the generalized Fokker-Planck solution accounting for the collective motion effect in order to fit all the particle spectra in Pb+Pb collisions, especially for extremely low region. According to these results, we can conclude that the new two-component distribution is the optimal method. From these analyses, we get more information about the particle production mechanism in Pb+Pb collision. We also wish more exciting results could be found in Pb+Pb collisions at TeV.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. S. Burrello for reading carefully their paper. This work is supported by the NSFC of China under Grant no. 11205106.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2017 Xuejiao Yin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The publication of this article was funded by SCOAP³.

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