Do Proton-Proton collisions at the LHC energies produce Droplets of Quark-Gluon Plasma?
Raghunath Sahoo
备注：
5 pages, 4-captioned figures, Presented in the plenary session of Workshop on Frontiers in High Energy Physics (FHEP-2019), Hyderabad, India (To appear in Springer Proc.)
The proton-proton ($pp$) collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, Switzerland has brought up new challenges and opportunities in understanding the experimental findings in contrast to the conventional lower energy $pp$ collisions. Usually $pp$ collisions are used as the baseline measurement at the GeV and TeV energies in order to understand a possible high density QCD medium formation in heavy-ion collisions. However, the TeV $pp$ collisions have created a new domain of research, where scientists have started observing heavy-ion-like features (signatures) in high-multiplicity $pp$ collisions. This warrants a relook into TeV $pp$ collisions, if at all QGP-droplets are produced in such collisions. In this presentation, I discuss some of the new findings and concepts emerging out in $pp$ collisions at the LHC energies along with some of the new emergent phenomena in particle production.
We investigate two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations of quark-gluon plasma droplet sources in single-event measurements. We find that the distribution of the fluctuation between correlation functions of the single- and mixed-events provide useful signals to detect the granular structure of the source.
We examine the two-pion interferometry for a granular source of quark-gluon plasma droplets. The evolution of the droplets is described by relativistic hydrodynamics with an equation of state suggested by lattice gauge results. Pions are assumed to be emitted thermally from the droplets at the freeze-out configuration characterized by a freeze-out temperature $T_f$. We find that the HBT radius $R_{out}$ decreases if the initial size of the droplets decreases. On the other hand, $R_{side}$ depends on the droplet spatial distribution and is relatively independent of the droplet size. It increase…
The energy densities achieved during central collisions of large nuclei at the AGS may be high enough to allow the formation of quark--gluon plasma. We propose that most collisions at AGS energies produce superheated hadronic matter, but in rare events a droplet of quark--gluon plasma is nucleated. We estimate the probability of this to occur based on homogeneous and inhomogeneous nucleation theory and discuss possible experimental signals.
We study the multiplicity and rapidity dependence of thermal and prompt photon production in p+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, using a (3+1)D viscous hydrodynamic framework. Direct photon anisotropic flow coefficients $v^γ_{2,3}$ and nuclear modification factor $R^γ_\mathrm{pPb}(p_T)$ are presented in both the p-going (backward) and the Pb-going (forward) directions. The interplay between initial state cold nuclear effect and final state thermal enhancement at different rapidity regions is discussed. The proposed rapidity dependent thermal photon enhancement and direct photon anisotropic flow obser…
Considering the low-temperature ($T$) and high-baryon-number-density ($n_B$) region of the QCD phase diagram, we present a model for the first-order phase transition between the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and the recently proposed colour superconducting phase. We study nucleation of a droplet of the superconducting phase within the metastable QGP gas. Numerical results for the activation energy, radius and other physical parameters of the droplets, at various temperatures, densities and gap parameters, are given. We have estimated the latent heat of the phase transition. In the $T-n_B$ plane, we…
The effect of two loop correction in the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) droplet is studied with the introduction of the two loop correction factor in the mean field potential. Due to the correction factor it shows stability in the droplet formation of QGP indicating at different parametrization factors of the QGP fluid. The correction factor in the potential also shows gluon parameter factor shifts to a larger value from its earlier value of gluon factor of one loop correction in obtaining the stable droplets. The results show decreasing in the observable QGP droplets and droplet sizes …
In many simulations of high-energy heavy-ion collisions on an event-by-event analysis, it is known that the initial energy density distribution in the transverse plane is highly fluctuating. Subsequent longitudinal expansion will lead to many longitudinal tubes of quark-gluon plasma which have tendencies to break up into many spherical droplets because of sausage instabilities. We are therefore motivated to use a model of quark-gluon plasma granular droplets that evolve hydrodynamically to investigate pion elliptic flows and Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometry. We find that the data of pion tra…
We show, through analytic arguments, numerical calculations, and comparison with experimental data, that the ratio of the high-p_T observables v_2/(1-R_AA) reaches a well-defined saturation value at high p_T, and that this ratio depends only on the spatial anisotropy of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) formed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. With expected future reduction of experimental errors, the anisotropy extracted from experimental data will further constrain the calculations of initial particle production in heavy-ion collisions and thus test our understanding of QGP physics.
We review free energy evolution of QGP (Quark-gluon plasma) under zero-loop, one loop and two loop corrections in the mean field potential. The free energies of QGP under the comparison of zero-loop and loop corrections of the interacting potential among the quarks, anti-quarks and gluons are shown. We observe that the formation of stable QGP droplet is dependent on the loop corrections with the different parametrization values of fluid. With the increase in the parametrization value, stability of droplet formation increases with smaller size of droplet. This indicates that the formation of QG…
We present a review on the explanation of the RHIC HBT puzzle by a granular pion-emitting source of quark-gluon plasma droplets. The evolution of the droplet is described by relativistic hydrodynamics with an equation of state suggested by lattice gauge results. The granular source evolution is obtained by superposing all of the evolutions of individual droplets. Pions are assumed to be emitted thermally from the droplets at the freeze-out configuration characterized by a freeze-out temperature $T_f$. We find that the average particle emission time scales with the initial radius of the droplet…
Although Tevatron has discovered top quark and LHC (pp collisions) has discovered Higgs boson but the RHIC and LHC heavy-ion colliders have not discovered thermalized quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This is because the experimental data of top quark at Tevatron and the experimental data of Higgs boson at LHC are compared with the exact first principle calculation but the experimental data at RHIC and LHC are compared with simplistic models and assumptions which are not exact first principle calculation. In this paper we show that the exact first principle method to study quark-gluon plasma at RHIC a…
Formation of Quark-Gluon Plasma droplets under Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions in the presence of magnetic fields with a modified hadronic medium
Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi（德里大学科里马尔学院）；Tata Institute of Fundamental Research（塔塔基础研究所）
The rate of quark-gluon plasma droplet nucleation in superheated hadronic matter is calculated within the MIT bag model. The requirements of color singletness and (to less extent) fixed momentum suppress the nucleation rate by many orders of magnitude, making thermal nucleation of quark-gluon plasma droplets unlikely in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions if the transition is first order and reasonably described by the bag model.
Thermal and interfacial properties of a QGP droplet in a hadronic medium are computed using a statistical model of the system. The results indicate a weakly first order transition at a transition temperature \sim (160 \pm 5) MeV. The interfacial surface tension is proportional to the cube of the transition temperaure irrespective of the magnitude of the transition temperature. The velocity of sound in the QGP droplet is predicted to be in the range (0.27 \pm 0.02) times the velocity of light in vacuum, and this value is seen to be independent of the value of the transition temperature as well …
Proton-proton (pp) collisions have been traditionally used as a baseline measurement in the search for a deconfined state of matter in heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies. The unprecedented collision energies that are available at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN) have illuminated new challenges in understanding the possible formation of droplets of this deconfined matter of partonic degrees of freedom in hadronic collisions, especially in high-multiplicity events. Enhancement of multi-strange particles compared to pions, degr…
The study of a quasi back-to-back isolated pair made of a heavy quarkonium, such as a J/psi or a Upsilon, and a photon produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, is probably the optimal way to get right away a first experimental determination of two gluon transverse-momentum-dependent distributions (TMDs) in an unpolarized proton, f1^g and h1^perp,g the latter giving the distribution of linearly polarized gluons. To substantiate this, we calculate the transverse-momentum-dependent effects that arise in the process under study and discuss the feasibility of their measurements.
The recent results in \sqrt{s}=2.76 TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported by the ALICE collaboration shows that the power-law energy-dependence of charged hadron multiplicity in Pb+Pb collisions is significantly different from p+p collisions. We show that this different energy-dependence can be explained by inclusion of a strong angular-ordering in the gluon-decay cascade within the Color-Glass-Condensate (or gluon saturation) approach. This effect is more important in nucleus-nucleus collisions where the saturation scale is larger than 1 GeV. Our prescription gives …
We extract the energy-dependence of the gluon-jet decay cascade from e^+e^- annihilation data and show that this energy-dependence has power-low behavior for the average transverse momentum of jet bigger than 1 GeV. We show that the observed different power-law energy-dependence of hadron multiplicity in AA compared to pp collisions at the LHC is due to the enhanced gluon-decay effect before hadronization. This effect is more important for AA collisions where the saturation scale is larger than 1 GeV. Here we confront our published predictions in arXiv:1102.2385 for the rapidity distribution o…
We recently introduced a completely new way to study ultrarelativistic nuclear scattering by providing a link between the string model approach and a statistical description. A key issue is the microcanonical treatment of hadronizing individual quark matter droplets. In this paper we describe in detail the hadronization of these droplets according to n-body phase space, by using methods of statistical physics, i.e. constructing Markov chains of hadron configurations.
We study the relevance of experimental data on heavy-flavor [$D^0$, $J/ψ$, $B\rightarrow J/ψ$ and $Υ(1S)$ mesons] production in proton-lead collisions at the LHC to improve our knowledge of the gluon-momentum distribution inside heavy nuclei. We observe that the nuclear effects encoded in both most recent global fits of nuclear parton densities at next-to-leading order (nCTEQ15 and EPPS16) provide a good overall description of the LHC data. We interpret this as a hint that these are the dominant ones. In turn, we perform a Bayesian-reweighting analysis for each particle data sample which shows…
Using the MIT bag model, we calculate the free energy of droplets of quark-gluon plasma in a bulk hadronic medium, and of hadronic bubbles in a bulk quark-gluon plasma, under the assumption of vanishing chemical potentials. We investigate the validity of the multiple reflection expansion approximation, and we advise a novel procedure for calculating finite-size corrections to the free energy of hadronic bubbles in a bulk quark-gluon plasma. While our results agree largely with earlier calculations, we show that the usual multiple reflection expansion should be used with caution, and we propose…
We propose a method to introduce Sudakov effects to the unintegrated gluon density promoting it to be hard scale dependent. The advantage of the approach is that it guarantees that the gluon density is positive definite and that the Sudakov effects cancel on integrated level. As a case study we apply the method to calculate angular correlations and $R_{pA}$ ratio for p+p vs. p+Pb collision in the production of forward-forward dijets.
By colliding ultrarelativistic ions, one achieves presently energy densities close to the critical value, concerning the formation of a quark-gluon-plasma. This indicates the importance of fluctuations and the necessity to go beyond the investigation of average events. Therefore, we introduce a percolation approach to model the final stage ($τ> 1$ fm/c) of ion-ion collisions, the initial stage being treated by well-established methods, based on strings and Pomerons. The percolation approach amounts to finding high density domains, and treating them as quark-matter droplets. In this way, we hav…
We study the radiative correction to $p_\perp$-broadening of a fast quark in a quark-gluon plasma beyond the soft gluon approximation. We find that the radiative contribution to quark $\langle p_\perp^2\rangle$ for RHIC and LHC conditions is negative.
The upcoming p+Pb run at the LHC will probe the nuclear gluon distribution at very small Bjorken x (from $x \sim 10^{-4}$ at mid-rapidity down to $x \sim 10^{-6}$ in the proton fragmentation region) and will allow to test approaches based on parton saturation. Here, we present the predictions of the KLN model for hadron multiplicities and multiplicity distributions in p+Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 4.4 TeV. We also compare the model to the existing pp, dA and AA data from RHIC and LHC.
We report on how $J/ψ$- and $Υ$-pair production are promising processes to access the polarised and unpolarised gluon TMDs at the LHC. We present the formalism used, as well as resulting observables that could be extracted from data.
A chain of connections in compressed baryonic matter, up-to-date glaringly missing in nuclear effective field theory, between intrinsic or emergent symmetries of QCD, mesons-gluons dualities, vector meson dominance and Chern-Simons fields has recently been revealed, presaging a possible new paradigm in nuclear theory. It indicates a ubiquitous role, thus far unexplored, of hidden symmetries -- flavor-local and scale -- permeating from dilute baryonic systems to normal nuclear matter and then to compact-star matter. Here I give a brief account of the possibly "indispensable" relevance of the $η…
Recent data on the azimuthal and transverse momentum dependence of high-pT>10 GeV pion nuclear modification factors in nuclear collisions at RHIC/BNL and LHC/CERN are analyzed in terms of a wide class of jet-energy loss models and a variety of transverse expanding collective flow backgrounds. RHIC data at 200 AGeV are found to be surprisingly consistent with rather different dE/dx models when coupled to recent 2+1D minimally viscous QGP flow field predictions. However, extrapolations to LHC, with parameters fixed at RHIC, favor running coupling QCD based energy-loss models over fixed coupling …
Initial conditions for quark-gluon plasma formation at $τ=0.1\fm$ are considered in lowest order perturbative QCD. Chemical composition, thermalization of the formed semihard quark-gluon system and especially implications of the new HERA parton distributions with the enhancement at small $x$ are studied. The plasma at $τ=0.1\fm$ is shown to be strongly gluon dominated both at RHIC and LHC, and a possibility for rapid thermalization of gluons at LHC is pointed out. Uncertainties in the calculations, particularly shadowing corrections to the parton distributions, are discussed. Free streaming an…
Beside comparatively low energy Cherenkov gluons observed at RHIC, there could be high energy gluons at LHC, related to the high energy region of positive real part of the forward scattering amplitude. In both cases they give rise to particles emitted along some cone. The characteristics of the cones produced by these two types of gluons are different. Therefore different experiments are needed to detect them. The cosmic ray event which initiated this idea is described in detail.
At the LHC, the processes with several particles in the final state occur routinely. These processes provide a new domain to test the Standard Model of particle physics. Due to large gluon luminosity at the LHC, gluon initiated processes will be quite important. We study the production of multi-vector bosons via gluon fusion. In particular we consider the process $ g g \to g γZ $ and compute its cross-section at hadron colliders.
We argue that already the first year run at the LHC with 3.5 TeV proton beams will provide a quick and effective way to test the dynamics of the color dipole-gluon interactions and the small x behavior of the gluon density in proton from study of the vector meson photoproduction in ultraperipheral proton-proton collisions.
The equations of in-medium gluodynamics are proposed. Their classical lowest order solution is explicitly shown for a color charge moving with constant speed. For nuclear permittivity larger than 1 it describes the shock wave induced by emission of Cherenkov gluons. Specific effects at LHC energies are described and compared with Mach wave predictions.
We study the intensity interferometry with lepton pairs for nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. It is argued that the invariant mass dependence of HBT radii extracted from the correlation functions of dilepton pairs can be used as an efficient tool to scale the size and life time of the quark gluon plasma expected to be formed in nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC. Quantitatively different magnitudes of HBT radii are obtained at RHIC and LHC indicating stronger radial flow at LHC.
We study chemical equilibration of quarks and gluons in central nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. The initial quark and gluon densities are taken from earlier studies as well as from recent perturbative QCD estimates and are then evolved via rate equations coupled to longitudinally boost-invariant fluid dynamics. We find that, for RHIC initial conditions, the lifetime of quark-gluon matter is too short in order for the quark and gluon number densities to chemically equilibrate prior to hadronization. In contrast, at LHC energies chemical equilibration is complete before the system h…
In this paper, the soft gluon resummation effect in double heavy quarkonium production at the LHC is studied. By applying the transverse momentum dependent factorization formalism, the large logarithms introduced by the small total transverse momentum of heavy quarkonium pair final state system, are resummed to all orders in the expansion of the strong interaction coupling at the Next-to-Leading Logarithm accuracy. We also compare our result with the LHC data. We find that the distribution shape predicted by resummation calculation is consistent with experimental data very well. Since this pro…
In our latest paper "Search for anomalous top-gluon couplings at LHC revisited" in Eur. Phys. J. C65 (2010), 127-135 (arXiv:0910.3049 [hep-ph]), we studied possible effects of nonstandard top-gluon couplings through the chromoelectric and chromomagnetic moments of the top quark using the total cross section of ppbar/pp --> ttbar X at Tevatron/LHC. There we pointed out that LHC data could give a stronger constraint on those two parameters, which would be hard to obtain from Tevatron data alone. We show here the first CMS measurement of this cross section actually makes it possible.
The existence of glueballs within QCD is uncontroversial but their experimental verification is still in doubt. We discuss the new possibilities for a search of glueballs as the leading object in gluon jets at the LHC. We summarize previous results from LEP which demonstrate a significant excess rate of electrically neutral leading clusters in comparison with MC models.
In high density QCD the hadron production stems from decay of mini-jets that have the transverse momenta of the order of the saturation scale. It is shown in this paper that this idea is able to describe in a unique fashion both the inclusive hadron production for \sqrt{s} \geq 546 GeV including the first data from LHC and the deep inelastic scattering at HERA. Recently reported data from ALICE, CMS and ATLAS including inclusive charged-hadron transverse-momentum and multiplicity distribution in pp collisions are well described in our approach. We provide predictions for the upcoming LHC measu…
We study the production of bottomonium states in heavy-ion reactions at collider energies available at RHIC and LHC. We employ an earlier constructed rate equation approach which accounts for both suppression and regeneration mechanisms in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and hadronization phases of the evolving thermal medium. Our previous predictions utilizing two limiting cases of strong and weak bottomonium binding in the QGP are updated by (i) checking the compatibility of the pertinent spectral functions with lattice-QCD results for euclidean correlators, (ii) adapting the initial conditions…
In this contribution to the Quark Matter 2012 conference, we study whether energy loss models established for RHIC energies to describe the quenching of heavy quarks can be applied at LHC with the same success. We also benefit from the larger $p_T$-range accessible at this accelerator to test the impact of gluon damping on observables such as the nuclear modification factor.
The presence of thermal gluons reduces the stimulated gluon emission off a heavy quark propagating in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) while absorption causes reduction of the radiative energy loss. On the other hand, the chromo-electromagnetic field fluctuations present in the QGP lead to collisional energy gain of the heavy quark. The net effect of the thermal gluon absorption and field fluctuations is a reduction of the total energy loss of the heavy quark, prominent at the lower momenta. We consider both kind of the energy gains along with the usual losses, and compute the nuclear modification…
Minijet production in $\sqrt{s} = 5.5$ TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC is expected to produce a gluon-dominated plasma with large initial temperatures and energy densities. We discuss the implications of the high initial temperatures on the screening mass and on the relative suppression of members of the $Υ$ family. We demonstrate that $p_T$-dependence of the $Υ'/Υ$ ratio is only expected if a quark-gluon plasma with significant energy density is present, and that the precise dependence of this ratio will strongly constrain the QGP models. We also propose that the $p_T$ spectra of the $Υ$ reso…
Exclusive photoproduction of vector mesons in the perturbative two-gluon exchange formalism depends significantly on nucleon and nuclear gluon distributions. In the present study we calculate total cross sections and rapidity distributions of $J/ψ(1s)$, $ψ(2s)$, $Υ(1s)$, $Υ(2s)$, and $Υ(3s)$ in ultraperipheral proton-lead (pPb) and lead-lead (PbPb) collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=5$ TeV and $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV respectively. Effects of gluon shadowing are investigated and potentials for constraining nuclear gluon modifications are discussed.
We explore the effects of shadowing on inclusive J/psi and Upsilon(1S) production at AFTER@LHC. We also present the rates as a function of p_T and rapidity for p+Pb and Pb+p collisions in the proposed AFTER@LHC rapidity acceptance.
The Quark Gluon String Model (QGSM) reproduces well the global characteristics of the $pp$ collisions at RHIC and LHC, e.g., the pseudorapidity and transverse momenta distributions at different centralities. The main goal of this work is to employ the Monte Carlo QGSM for description of femtoscopic characteristics in $pp$ collisions at RHIC and LHC. The study is concentrated on the low multiplicity and multiplicity averaged events, where no collective effects are expected. The different procedures for fitting the one-dimensional correlation functions of pions are studied and compared with the …
The event-by-event multiplicity distribution, the energy densities and energy density weighted eccentricity moments epsilon_n (up to n=6) at early times in heavy-ion collisions at both RHIC (root-s=200 GeV) and LHC (root-s=2.76 TeV) are computed in the IP-Glasma model. This framework combines the impact parameter dependent saturation model (IP-Sat) for nucleon parton distributions (constrained by HERA deeply inelastic scattering data) with an event-by-event classical Yang-Mills description of early-time gluon fields in heavy-ion collisions. The model produces multiplicity distributions that ar…
Coupling of the quark-gluon plasma from the early stage of heavy-ion collisions is argued to be weaker at LHC than at RHIC. For this reason, the role of instabilities - the pre-equilibrium plasma is unstable with respect to chromomagnetic modes - will be enhanced. The instabilities isotropize the system and speed up the process of equilibration. A possibility to observe direct signals of the instabilities is considered.
The coherent hadron production analogous to Cherenkov radiation of photons gives rise to the ring-like events. Being projected on the ring diameter they produce the two-bump structure recently observed for the away-side jets at RHIC. The position of the peaks and their height determine such properties of the hadronic medium as its nuclear index of refraction, the parton density, the free path length and the energy loss of Cherenkov gluons. Beside comparatively low energy gluons observed at RHIC, there could be high energy gluons at LHC, related to the high energy region of positive real part o…
$J/ψ$- or $Υ$-pair production at the LHC are promising processes to study the gluon transverse momentum distributions (TMDs) which remain very poorly known. In this article, we improve on previous results by including the TMD evolution in the computation of the observables such as the pair-transverse-momentum spectrum and asymmetries arising from the linear polarization of gluons inside unpolarized protons. We show that the azimuthal asymmetries generated by the gluon polarization are reduced compared to the tree level case but are still of measurable size (in the 5%-10% range). Such asymmetri…
Pair production of Z bosons in association with a hard jet is an important background for Higgs particle or new physics searches at the LHC. The loop-induced gluon-fusion process gg > ZZg contributes formally only at the next-to-next-to-leading order. Nevertheless, it can get enhanced by the large gluon flux at the LHC, and thus should be taken into account in relevant experimental searches. We provide the details and results of this calculation, which involves the manipulation of rank-5 pentagon integrals. Our results show that the gluon-fusion process can contribute more than 10% to the next…
The collective effect of emission by the forward moving partons of high energy Cherenkov gluons in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC energies is considered. It can reveal itself as peaks in the pseudorapidity distribution of jets at midrapidities or as a ring-like structure of individual events in event-by-event analysis. The pseudorapidity distribution of centers of dense isolated groups of particles in HIJING model is determined. It can be considered as the background for Cherenkov gluons. If peaks above this background were found in experiment, they would indicate new collective ef…
We show estimates for shadowing of gluons at small values of $x$, appropriate to RHIC and LHC experiments using a new evolution equation which takes into account the effects of gluon recombination to all orders in gluon density. We show that there is a significant depletion in the gluon density of large nuclei.
Theoretical understanding of the observed jet quenching measurements at RHIC and LHC is challenging in QCD because it requires understanding of parton to hadron fragmentation function in non-equilibrium QCD. In this paper, by using closed-time path integral formalism, we derive the gauge invariant definition of the gluon to hadron fragmentation function in non-equilibrium QCD which is consistent with factorization theorem in non-equilibrium QCD from first principles.
We discuss production of charm and bottom quarks at forward rapidity in pp collisions at the LHC, updating the QCD predictions for the run at \sqrt{S}=13 TeV. We show that, while the absolute rates suffer from large theoretical systematics, dominated by scale uncertainties, the increase relative to the rates precisely measured at 7 TeV can be predicted with an accuracy of a few percent, sufficient to highlight the sensitivity to the gluon distribution function.
