Limiting Fragmentation in a Thermal Model with Flow

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phenomenon of limiting fragmentation in high-energy nuclear collisions using a thermal model with flow, finding it holds at lower energies but breaks down at top RHIC and LHC energies, and provides predictions for future collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a hydrodynamic-like thermal model with flow to study limiting fragmentation in pion rapidity spectra across a wide energy range.

Findings

Limiting fragmentation observed from AGS to lower RHIC energies.

Violation of limiting fragmentation at top RHIC and LHC energies.

Predictions for Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV.

Abstract

The property of limiting fragmentation of various observables such as rapidity distributions ($dN/dy$), elliptic flow ($v_{2}$), average transverse momentum ($\langle p_{T} \rangle$) etc. of charged particles is observed when they are plotted as a function of rapidity ($y$) shifted by the beam rapidity ($y_{beam}$) for a wide range of energies from AGS to RHIC. Limiting fragmentation (LF) is a well studied phenomenon as observed in various collision energies and colliding systems experimentally. It is very interesting to verify this phenomenon theoretically. We study such a phenomenon for pion rapidity spectra using our hydrodynamic-like model where the collective flow is incorporated in a thermal model in the longitudinal direction. Our findings advocate the observation of extended longitudinal scaling in the rapidity spectra of pions from AGS to lower RHIC energies, while it is observed to be violated at top RHIC and LHC energies. Prediction of LF hypothesis for Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=5.02 TeV is given.