Diffractive and non-diffractive wounded nucleons and final states in pA collisions

TL;DR

This paper reviews and improves Glauber-inspired models for pA and AA collisions by better accounting for diffractive processes and proposes a new method to estimate final-state properties in pA collisions using multiparton interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a new Glauber-like model that incorporates diffractive excitation processes more accurately and proposes a novel approach to extrapolate event characteristics from pp to pA collisions.

Findings

Enhanced modeling of diffractive excitation in Glauber models.

New method to estimate pA collision properties from pp data.

Potential for better understanding of nuclear effects in high-energy collisions.

Abstract

We review the state-of-the-art of Glauber-inspired models for estimating the distribution of the number of participating nucleons in pA and AA collisions. We argue that there is room for improvement in these models when it comes to the treatment of diffractive excitation processes, and present a new simple Glauber-like model where these processes are better taken into account. We also suggest a new way of using the number of participating, or wounded, nucleons to extrapolate event characteristics from pp collisions, and hence get an estimate of basic hadronic final-state properties in pA collisions, which may be used to extract possible nuclear effects. The new method is inspired by the Fritiof model, but based on the full, semi-hard multiparton interaction model of Pythia 8.