Hadron production at the LHC: Any indication of new phenomena

TL;DR

This paper compares different theoretical models of hadron production at the LHC with experimental data, finding that gluon saturation models better describe the observations and suggesting potential evidence for new QCD phenomena.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that gluon saturation models align well with LHC data, providing evidence for possible new phenomena in high-energy QCD.

Findings

Gluon saturation models fit LHC data better than soft Pomeron models.

First LHC data supports the gluon saturation approach.

Potential indication of new QCD phenomena if saturation is confirmed.

Abstract

We confront soft Pomeron and gluon saturation models with the first LHC data on inclusive hadron production. We claim that while the first type of models are not able to describe some part of the LHC data, the Colour-Glass-Condensate (gluon saturation) approach gives an adequate description of the data. Here, we compare our published predictions with the recently available 7 TeV data. We firmly believe that if further experimental measurements confirm that the gluon saturation works, it will be a major discovery.