Bose-Einstein condensation of pions in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider using non-extensive Tsallis statistics

Abstract

The possibility of formation of Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) is studied in pp collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 7$$ TeV at the Large Hadron Collider. A thermodynamically consistent non-extensive formulation of the identified hadron transverse momentum distributions is used to estimate the critical temperature required to form BEC of charged pions, which are the most abundant species in a multi-particle production process in hadronic and nuclear collisions. The obtained results have been contrasted with the systems produced in Pb-Pb collisions to have a better understanding. We observe an explicit dependency of BEC critical temperature and number of particles in the pion condensates on the non-extensive parameter q, which is a measure of degree of non-equilibrium – as q decreases, the critical temperature increases and approaches to the critical temperature obtained from Bose-Einstein statistics without non-extensivity. Studies are performed on the final state multiplicity dependence of number of particles in the pion condensates in a wide range of multiplicity covering hadronic and heavy-ion collisions, using the inputs from experimental transverse momentum spectra.