Limiting fragmentation as an initial-state probe in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We discuss limiting fragmentation within a few currently popular phenomenological models. We show that popular Glauber-inspired models of particle production in heavy ion collisions, such as the two-component model, generally fail to reproduce limiting fragmentation when all energies and system sizes experimentally available are considered. This is due to the energy-dependence of number of participants and number of collisions. We quantify this violation in terms of the model parameters. We also make the same calculation within a Color Glass Condensate scenario and show that the dependence of the saturation scale on the number of participants generally leads to violation of limiting fragmentation. We further argue that wounded parton models, provided the nucleon size and parton density vary predominantly with Bjorken $x$, could in principle reproduce both multiplicity dependence with energy and limiting fragmentation. We suggest, therefore, that an experimental measurement of deviation from limiting fragmentation in heavy ion collisions, for different system sizes and including the experimentally available range of energies, is a powerful test of initial state models.