2017/07/31 by Javier L. Albacete, Hannah Petersen, Alba Soto-Ontoso
Physics and Astronomy · #Cumulant #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Large Hadron Collider #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Proton #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Statistics #Substructure #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2018.01.011
9 pages, 8 figures. New section on the number of subnucleonic constituents of the proton added. Accepted for publication in PLB
arxiv created 2018/01/08 · openalex publication_date 2018/01/12 · arxiv updated 2018/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a systematic study of the normalized symmetric cumulants, NSC(n,m), at the eccentricity level in proton-proton interactions at s=13TeV within a wounded hot spot approach. We focus our attention on the influence of spatial correlations between the proton constituents, in our case gluonic hot spots, on this observable. We notice that the presence of short-range repulsive correlations between the hot spots systematically decreases the values of NSC(2,3) and NSC(2,4) in mid- to ultra-central collisions while increases them in peripheral interactions. In the case of NSC(2,3) we find that, as suggested by data, an anti-correlation of ε2 and ε3 in ultra-central collisions, i.e. NSC(2,3)<0, is possible within the correlated scenario while it never occurs without correlations when the number of gluonic hot spots is set to three. We attribute this fact to the decisive role of correlations on enlarging the probability of interaction topologies that reduce the value of NSC(2,3) and, eventually, make it negative. Further, we explore the dependence of our conclusions on the number of hot spots, the values of the hot spot radius and the repulsive core distance. Our results add evidence to the idea that considering spatial correlations between the subnucleonic degrees of freedom of the proton may have a strong impact on the initial state properties of proton-proton interactions [1].