The thermal model on the verge of the ultimate test: particle production in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the thermal model's predictions for hadron production, including charmonium, in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, emphasizing its potential to test the model's validity against experimental data.

Contribution

It provides new predictions for charmonium production and nuclear modification factors at LHC energies, extending the thermal model analysis to higher energy regimes.

Findings

Predicted nuclear modification factor of charmonium at LHC exceeds RHIC observations.

Thermal model successfully describes light-quark hadron production.

Predictions depend on charm production cross section, which is yet unmeasured.

Abstract

We investigate the production of hadrons in nuclear collisions within the framework of the thermal (or statistical hadronization) model. We discuss both the ligh-quark hadrons as well as charmonium and provide predictions for the LHC energy. Even as its exact magnitude is dependent on the charm production cross section, not yet measured in Pb-Pb collisions, we can confidently predict that at the LHC the nuclear modification factor of charmonium as a function of centrality is larger than that observed at RHIC and compare the experimental results to these predictions.