Transport Dynamics of Parton Interactions in pp Collisions at LHC Energies

TL;DR

This study uses a Boltzmann transport model to analyze parton interactions in proton-proton collisions at LHC energies, revealing rapid increases in parton production, collisions, and strangeness enhancement with energy and centrality, supporting fluid-like behavior in high-multiplicity events.

Contribution

It provides a detailed space-time description of parton dynamics in pp collisions at LHC energies using a semi-hard pQCD-based transport approach, highlighting the significance of partonic interactions.

Findings

Parton production and collisions increase rapidly with energy.

Number of parton interactions rises with decreasing impact parameter.

Strangeness enhancement factor saturates at high energies.

Abstract

We investigate the transport dynamics of partons in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider using a Boltzmann transport approach, the parton cascade model. The calculations include semi-hard pQCD interaction of partons populating the nucleons and provide a space-time description of the collision in terms of cascading partons undergoing scatterings and fragmentations. Parton production and number of collisions rise rapidly with increase in center of mass energy of the collision. For a given center of mass energy, the number of parton interactions is seen to rise stronger than linear with decreasing impact parameter before saturating for very central collisions. The strangeness enhance factor $\gamma_s$ for the semi-hard processes is found to rise rapidly and saturate towards the highest collision energies. Overall, our study indicates a significant amount of partonic interactions in proton-proton collisions, which supports the observation of fluid-like behavior for high multiplicity proton-proton collisions observed in the experiments.