The Angantyr model for Heavy-Ion Collisions in PYTHIA8

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Angantyr model, extending PYTHIA8 to simulate complete hadronic final states in high-energy nucleus collisions, incorporating fluctuations and diffractive excitation, and matching experimental multiplicity and momentum distributions.

Contribution

It presents a novel model that extrapolates PYTHIA8 for nucleus collisions, including fluctuations and diffractive effects, bridging a gap in heavy-ion collision phenomenology.

Findings

Good description of multiplicity distributions

Accurate transverse momentum spectra

Baseline for non-collective background

Abstract

We present a new model for building up complete exclusive hadronic final states in high energy nucleus collisions. It is a direct extrapolation of high energy pp collisions (as described by PYTHIA), and thus bridges a large part of the existing gap between heavy ion and high energy physics phenomenology. The model is inspired by the old Fritiof model and the notion of wounded nucleons. Two essential features are the treatment of multi-parton interactions and diffractive excitation in each NN sub-collision. Diffractive excitation is related to fluctuations in the nucleon partonic sub-structure, and fluctuations in both projectile and target are here included for the first time. The model is able to give a good description of general final-state properties such as multiplicity and transverse momentum distributions, both in pA and AA collisions. The model can therefore serve as a baseline for understanding the non-collective background to observables sensitive to collective behaviour. As PYTHIA does not include a mechanism to reproduce the collective effects seen in pp collisions, such effects are also not reproduced by the present version of Angantyr. Effects of high string density, shown to be able to reproduce e.g. higher strangeness ratios and the ridge in pp, will be added in future studies