Influence of quantum conservation laws on particle production in hadron collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum conservation laws affect particle production in high-energy hadron-hadron collisions, revealing that current models fail to accurately reproduce experimental correlation data at 7 TeV.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed study of conservation law effects on particle correlations in hadron-hadron collisions at LHC energies, highlighting discrepancies with existing models.

Findings

Conservation laws significantly shape particle correlation functions in pp collisions.

Current models like PYTHIA and PHOJET do not match the experimental data well.

Experimental results emphasize the need to incorporate conservation effects in theoretical models.

Abstract

Conservation laws strongly influence production of particles in high-energy particle collisions. Effects connected to these mechanisms were studied in details using correlation techniques in \ee\ collisions. At the time, models were tuned to correctly reproduce the measurements. Similar studies for hadron-hadron collisions have never been performed, until recent ALICE measurements. ALICE has reported on studies of untriggered two-particle angular correlations of identified particles ($\pi$, $K$, and p) measured in pp collisions at center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=$ 7 TeV. Those preliminary results confirm that also in hadron-hadron collisions, at much higher energies, conservation laws strongly influence the shape of the correlation functions for different particle types and must be taken into account while analysing the data. Moreover, they show that the contemporary models (PYTHIA, PHOJET) no longer reproduce the experimental data well.