Through the looking-glass with ALICE into the quark-gluon plasma: A new test for hadronic interaction models used in air shower simulations

Luis A Anchordoqui,Carlos García Canal,Sergio J Sciutto,Jorge F Soriano

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135837

Luis A Anchordoqui, Carlos García Canal + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135837

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Journal: Physics Letters B	Publication Date: Oct 2, 2020
Citations: 26	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: City University of New York

Abstract

Recently, the ALICE Collaboration reported an enhancement of the yield ratio of strange and multi-strange hadrons to charged pions as a function of multiplicity at mid-rapidity in proton-proton, proton-lead, lead-lead, and xenon-xenon scattering. ALICE observations provide a strong indication that a quark-gluon plasma is partly formed in high multiplicity events of both small and large colliding systems. Motivated by ALICE's results, we propose a new test for hadronic interaction models used for analyzing ultra-high-energy-cosmic-ray (UHECR) collisions with air nuclei. The test is grounded in the almost equal column-energy density in UHECR-air collisions and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. We applied the test to post-LHC event generators describing hadronic phenomena of UHECR scattering and show that these QCD Monte Carlo-based codes must be retuned to accommodate the strangeness enhancement relative to pions observed in LHC data.

Highlights

Through the looking-glass with ALICE into the quark-gluon plasma: A new test for hadronic interaction models used in air shower simulations
Motivated by ALICE’s results, we propose a new test for hadronic interaction models used for analyzing ultra-highenergy-cosmic-ray (UHECR) collisions with air nuclei
We applied the test to postLHC event generators describing hadronic phenomena of UHECR scattering and show that these QCD Monte Carlo-based codes must be retuned to accommodate the strangeness enhancement relative to pions observed in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data

Summary

Introduction

Through the looking-glass with ALICE into the quark-gluon plasma: A new test for hadronic interaction models used in air shower simulations. The ALICE Collaboration reported an enhancement of the yield ratio of strange and multi-strange hadrons to charged pions as a function of multiplicity at mid-rapidity in proton-proton, proton-lead, lead-lead, and xenon-xenon scattering. The ALICE Collaboration reported enhancement of the yield ratio of multi-strange hadrons to charged pions as a function of multiplicity at mid-rapidity in LHC proton-proton (pp), proton-lead (pPb), lead-lead (PbPb), and xenon-xenon (XeXe) collisions [9,10,11,12].

Results

Conclusion