Effective-energy universality approach describing total multiplicity centrality dependence in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper applies the effective-energy approach, combining quark models and hydrodynamics, to describe charged particle multiplicity dependence on collision centrality in heavy-ion collisions up to 5 TeV, explaining differences between RHIC and LHC data.

Contribution

It introduces a unified effective-energy framework that accounts for centrality dependence and energy scaling, extending previous models to high-energy heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Effective-energy approach accurately describes multiplicity centrality dependence.

Differences between RHIC and LHC data explained by energy-balanced limiting fragmentation.

Proposes similarity between central and most central collision data.

Abstract

The recently proposed participant dissipating effective-energy approach is applied to describe the dependence on centrality of the multiplicity of charged particles measured in heavy-ion collisions at the collision energies up to the highest LHC energy of 5 TeV. The effective-energy approach relates multihadron production in different types of collisions, by combining, under the proper collision energy scaling, the constituent quark picture with Landau relativistic hydrodynamics. The measurements are shown to be well described in terms of the centrality-dependent effective energy of participants and an explanation of the differences in the measurements at RHIC and LHC are given by means of the recently introduced hypothesis of the energy-balanced limiting fragmentation scaling. A similarity between the centrality data and the data from most central collisions is proposed pointing to the central character of participant interactions independent of centrality. The findings complement our recent investigations of the similar midrapidity pseudorapidity density measurements extending the description to the full pseudorapidity range in view of the considered similarity of multihadron production in nucleon interactions and heavy-ion collisions.