Universal behavior of transverse momentum distributions of baryons and mesons in the framework of percolation of strings

Abstract

In the framework of percolation of strings, the transverse momentum distributions in AA and hh collisions at all centralities and energies show a universal behavior. The width of these distributions is related to the width of the distribution of the size of the clusters formed by the overlapping of the strings produced. The difference between the distributions for baryons and mesons originates in the fragmentation of clusters of several strings, which enhances the particles with a higher number of constituents. The results agree with SPS and RHIC data. The predictions for LHC show differences for baryons compared with RHIC. At LHC energies we obtain also a high pT suppression for pp high multiplicity events compared with the pp minimum bias.