Abstract
Transverse spectra of both jets and hadrons obtained in high-energy and collisions at central rapidity exhibit power-law behavior of at high . The power index is 4–5 for jet production and is 6–10 for hadron production. Furthermore, the hadron spectra spanning over 14 orders of magnitude down to the lowest region in collisions at the LHC can be adequately described by a single nonextensive statistical mechanical distribution that is widely used in other branches of science. This suggests indirectly the possible dominance of the hard-scattering process over essentially the whole region at central rapidity in high-energy and collisions. We show here direct evidences of such a dominance of the hard-scattering process by investigating the power indices of UA1 and ATLAS jet spectra over an extended region and the two-particle correlation data of the STAR and PHENIX collaborations in high-energy and collisions at central rapidity. We then study how the showering of the hard-scattering product partons alters the power index of the hadron spectra and leads to a hadron distribution that may be cast into a single-particle nonextensive statistical mechanical distribution. Because of such a connection, the nonextensive statistical mechanical distribution may be considered as a lowest-order approximation of the hard-scattering of partons followed by the subsequent process of parton showering that turns the jets into hadrons, in high-energy and collisions.
1 More- Received 8 May 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.114027
© 2015 American Physical Society