Topological studies of light-flavor hadron production in pp, p-Pb, and Pb-Pb collisions with ALICE at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates light-flavor hadron production and system size effects in various collision systems at the LHC, revealing heavy-ion-like behaviors in small systems and exploring potential jet quenching signatures using event shape observables.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of event shape observables in small collision systems to disentangle soft and hard processes and examines system size dependence of hadron production at the LHC.

Findings

Heavy-ion-like behaviors observed in high-multiplicity pp and p-Pb collisions.

Evolution of average transverse momentum with multiplicity and system size.

No definitive evidence of jet quenching in small systems.

Abstract

Recent results for high multiplicity pp and p-Pb collisions have revealed that they exhibit heavy-ion-like behaviors. To understand the origin(s) of these unexpected phenomena, event shape observables such as transverse spherocity ($S_{\rm 0}^{p_{\rm T} = 1}$) and the relative transverse activity classifier ($R_{\rm{T}}$) can be exploited as a powerful tools to disentangle soft (non-perturbative) and hard (perturbative) particle production. Here, the production of light-flavor hadrons is shown for various $S_{\rm 0}^{p_{\rm T} = 1}$ classes in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 $\textrm{TeV}$ measured with the ALICE detector at the LHC are presented. The evolution of average transverse momentum ($\langle p_{\rm T}\rangle$) with charged-particle multiplicity, and identified particle ratios as a function of $p_{\rm T}$ for different $S_{\rm 0}^{p_{\rm T} = 1}$ are also presented. In addition, the system size dependence of charged-particle production in pp, p-Pb, and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV is presented. The evolution of $\langle p_{\rm T}\rangle$ in different topological regions as a function of $R_{\rm{T}}$ are presented. Finally, using the same approach, we present a search for jet quenching behavior in small collision systems.