Eur. Phys. J. C (2008) 53: 585-589
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-007-0500-7

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Universal behavior of transverse momentum distributions of baryons and mesons in the framework of percolation of strings

¹ Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías, Facultad de Física, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Campus Sur s/n, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
² Departamento de Física de Partículas, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
³ CENTRA, Instituto Superior Técnico, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal

^* e-mail: leticia@fpaxp1.usc.es

Received: 2 August 2007
Revised: 20 August 2007
Published online: 8 January 2008

Abstract

In the framework of percolation of strings, the transverse momentum distributions in AA and hh collisions at all centralities and energies show a universal behavior. The width of these distributions is related to the width of the distribution of the size of the clusters formed by the overlapping of the strings produced. The difference between the distributions for baryons and mesons originates in the fragmentation of clusters of several strings, which enhances the particles with a higher number of constituents. The results agree with SPS and RHIC data. The predictions for LHC show differences for baryons compared with RHIC. At LHC energies we obtain also a high p_T suppression for pp high multiplicity events compared with the pp minimum bias.