Particle production at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider within evolutionary model

TL;DR

This study uses the integrated hydrokinetic model to analyze particle production in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC, highlighting the importance of inelastic reactions and continuous chemical freeze-out in accurately describing experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed comparison of particle yields with and without inelastic reactions, demonstrating the significance of continuous chemical freeze-out in modeling heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Inelastic reactions significantly affect particle ratios.

Continuous chemical freeze-out improves data description.

Results are consistent across different equations of state.

Abstract

The particle yields and particle number ratios in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC energy $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV are described within the integrated hydrokinetic model (iHKM) at the two different equations of state (EoS) for the quark-gluon matter and the two corresponding hadronization temperatures, $T=165$ MeV and $T=156$ MeV. The role of particle interactions at the final afterburner stage of the collision in the particle production is investigated by means of comparison of the results of full iHKM simulations with those where the annihilation and other inelastic processes (except for resonance decays) are switched off after hadronization/particlization, similarly as in the thermal models. An analysis supports the picture of continuous chemical freeze-out in the sense that the corrections to the sudden chemical freeze-out results, which arise because of the inelastic reactions at the subsequent evolution times, are noticeable and improve the description of particle and number ratios. An important observation is that although the particle number ratios with switched-off inelastic reactions are quite different at different particlization temperatures which are adopted for different equations of state to reproduce experimental data, the complete iHKM calculations bring very close results in both cases.