A New Review of Excitation Functions of Hadron Production in pp Collisions in the NICA Energy Range

Abstract

Data on hadron multiplicities from inelastic proton-proton interactions in the energy range of the NICA collider have been compiled. The compilation includes recent results from the NA61/SHINE and NA49 experiments at the CERN SPS accelerator. New parameterizations for excitation functions of mean multiplicities $$\left\langle {{{\pi }^{ \pm }}} \right\rangle $$, $$\left\langle {{{K}^{ \pm }}} \right\rangle $$, $$\left\langle {K_{S}^{0}} \right\rangle $$, $$\left\langle \Lambda \right\rangle $$, $$\left\langle p \right\rangle $$, $$\left\langle {\bar {p}} \right\rangle $$ are obtained in the region of collision energies $$3 < \sqrt {{{s}_{{NN}}}} < 31$$ GeV. The energy dependence of the particle yields, as well as variation of rapidity and transverse momentum distributions are discussed. A standalone algorithm for hadron phase space generation in $$pp$$ collisions is suggested and compared to model predictions using an example of the PHQMD generator. The investigation has been performed at the Laboratory of High Energy Physics, JINR.