Extrapolation of hadron production in nucleus-nucleus collisions to energies reached at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN Large Hadron Collider with the two-component dual parton model.

Abstract

We present a Monte Carlo version of the dual parton model for the description of particle production in hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions. Each nucleon-nucleon collision is described by the two-component dual parton model. Soft hadronic collisions and hard perturbative collisions (minijets) are the two components included in the unitarization scheme. Depending on the transverse momentum cutoff we find up to several thousand minijets in collisions of heavy ions at the TeV energies of the future CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We get predictions up to energies reached at the LHC for the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions and the minijet component of the hadronic energy density.