Application of the Non-extensive Statistical Approach to High Energy Particle Collisions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that high-energy particle collision spectra are better described by non-extensive thermodynamics using Tsallis distributions, revealing energy and particle species dependencies in the parameters.

Contribution

It applies the Tsallis non-extensive thermodynamics framework to analyze identified hadron spectra across various energies, highlighting parameter dependencies and QCD-inspired evolution.

Findings

Tsallis parameters depend on collision energy and particle type

Spectra are well described by Tsallis-Pareto distributions

QCD-inspired model explains parameter evolution

Abstract

In high-energy collisions the number of the created particles is far less than the thermodynamic limit, especially in small colliding systems (e.g. proton-proton). Therefore final-state effects and fluctuations in the one-particle energy distribution are appreciable. As a consequence the characterization of identified hadron spectra with the Boltzmann\,--\,Gibbs thermodynamical approach is insufficient. Instead particle spectra measured in high-energy collisions can be described very well with Tsallis\,--\,Pareto distributions, derived from non-extensive thermodynamics. Using the Tsallis q-entropy formula, a generalization of the Boltzmann\,--\,Gibbs entropy, we interpret the microscopical physics by analysing the Tsallis $q$ and $T$ parameters. In this paper we give a quick overview on these parameters, analyzing identified hadron spectra from recent years in a wide center of mass energy range. We demonstrate that the fitted Tsallis-parameters show dependency on this energy and on the particle species. Our findings are described well by a QCD inspired evolution ansatz.