Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

The p + p (proton + proton) collisions are important to understand particle production mechanism in partonic collisions and are also used as baseline for heavy ion collisions. We present systematic study of meson spectra in p + p collisions at LHC energies (√s = 0.9, 2.76 and 7.0 TeV). We also studied the transverse mass (mT) spectra of pion and kaon for p + p collisions at all above mentioned energies. In an earlier study [1], it was shown that all the mesons produced in p + p and d + Au collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV follow mT scaling while in Au + Au collisions at same energy the mesons with strange and charm quark contents do not follow mT scaling which can be attributed to medium modifications. Here we fit all pion spectra with Hagedorn distribution and extract all the output parameters from the fitting. Then we fit kaon spectra using mT scaling with the help of those extracted fitting parameters along with a normalizing factor. We observed that mT scaling in case of kaon is valid in p + p collisions at LHC energies. The normalizing factor of kaon with respect to pion (K/п) is almost constant in all energies . This study is important for the observation of strangeness enhancement in heavy ion collisions, which is an important probe of quark gluon plasma (QGP). It is also used as a baseline for the study of medium modifications in heavy ion collisions. Kaon spectra provides a unique opportunity to identify new flavor and CP violating interactions beyond the Standard Model (SM).
Keywords: LHC, Hagedorn Function, Meson Spectra.