Systematic Comparison of Tsallis Statistics for Charged Pions Produced In $pp$ Collisions

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares Tsallis statistical parameters for charged pion production in proton-proton collisions across a wide energy range, revealing energy-dependent deviations from Boltzmann statistics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of how Tsallis parameters evolve with energy and interprets their behavior in terms of underlying QCD processes.

Findings

Deviations from Boltzmann increase with energy.

Tsallis statistics effectively describe power-like spectra at high energies.

Boltzmann distribution remains relevant at lower energies.

Abstract

The energy dependence of Tsallis statistics parameters is presented for charged pions produced at beam energies ranging between 6.3 GeV and 7 TeV. It is found that deviations from Boltzmann statistics are monotonically growing with beam energy. This may be attributed to the dominance of low $x$ at higher energies leading to the power-like NLO QCD spectra for which Tsallis statistics may serve as effective theory. At the same time, for larger $x$ at lower beam energies the Gaussian falloff of transverse-momentum-dependent distributions is crucial and correspondent effective description is provided by the Boltzmann distribution.