Charged particle pseudorapidity distributions from SPS to LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews charged particle pseudorapidity distributions in heavy ion collisions across multiple accelerators, highlighting their role in understanding system properties and discussing future measurements at the LHC.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of analysis techniques and results from SPS and RHIC, and discusses prospects for measurements at the LHC.

Findings

Scaling of charged particle yield with centrality

Scaling of charged particle yield with energy

Preparation for LHC measurements

Abstract

Pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles produced in heavy ion collisions are a powerful tool to characterize the global properties of the created system. They have been measured in a wide range of energies at the GSI, AGS, SPS and RHIC accelerators and will be one of the first measurements at ALICE at the LHC. The various analysis techniques developed by SPS and RHIC experiments are reviewed and the presently available results from SPS and RHIC are presented, focusing in particular on the scaling of charged particle yield with centrality and with center-of-mass energy. Finally the perspectives for the multiplicity measurement in the ALICE experiment at the LHC are discussed.