Scaling of particle production with number of participants in high-energy A+A collisions in the parton-cascade model
Abstract
In view of the recent WA98 data of pi0 spectra from central Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS, we analyze the production of neutral pions for A+
collisionsacrosstheperiodictableatsqrt(s)=17AGeVand200AGeVwithintheframeworkoftheparton−cascademodelforrelativisticheavyioncollisions.Themultiplicityofthepions(havingpT>0.5GeV/c)inthecentralrapidityregion,isseentoscaleas∼(
N
p
art
)
a
lpha,where
N
p
art
is the number of participating nucleons, which we have approximated as 2A for central collisions of identical nuclei. We argue that the deviation of \alpha (\simeq 1.2) from unity may have its origin in the multiple scattering suffered by the partons. We also find that the constant of proportionality in the above scaling relation increases substantially in going from SPS to RHIC energies. This would imply that the (semi)hard partonic activity becomes a much cleaner signal above the soft particle production at the higher energy of RHIC, and thus much less dependent on the (lack of) understanding of the underlying soft physics background.