Using a Strongly Intense Observable to Study the Formation of Quark-Gluon String Clusters in pp Collisions at LHC Energies

Abstract

Within the framework of the model with quark-gluon strings (color flux tubes) as sources, the properties of the strongly intense variable Σ, which characterizes the correlations between the number of particles in two observation windows separated in rapidity, are studied. It is shown that, in pp collisions at LHC energies, string fusion effects leading to the formation of string clusters have a significant effect on the behavior of this observable. The experimentally observed changes in this variable with the initial energy and centrality of the pp collision can only be explained by taking into account the formation of string clusters consisting of an increasing number of merged strings. It is demonstrated that the study of the behavior of the Σ observable as a function of the rapidity distance between the centers of the observation windows and the width of these windows with variable experimental conditions using different energies and centralities of pp-collisions makes it possible to extract the parameters of string clusters from the experimental data.