Measurements of charged particle multiplicity distributions in the central rapidity region in p-p and p-α, and α-α collisions are reported. They are better fitted to the “wounded nucleon” than to the “gluon string” model. The average transverse momenta, for all three reactions, are identical (and almost independent of multiplicity) up to very high multiplicities.
The Split Field Magnet facility at the CERN ISR has been used to measure inclusive resonance production in inelastic p-p collisions at a c.m. energy of 53 GeV. The mass spectrum of pairs of oppositely charged hadrons shows a strong correlation, which can be explained as a consequence of dominant vector meson production, accounting for more than 60% of all pions and kaons produced.
Measurements of jet characteristics from inclusive jet production in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV are presented. The data sample was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC during 2010 and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns. The mean charged hadron multiplicity, the differential and integral jet shape distributions, and two independent moments of the shape distributions are measured as functions of the jet transverse momentum for jets reconstructed with the anti-kT algorithm. The measured observables are corrected to the particle level and compared with predictions from various QCD Monte Carlo generators.
A measurement of the underlying activity in scattering processes with transverse momentum scale in the GeV region is performed in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 TeV, using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. Charged hadron production is studied with reference to the direction of a leading object, either a charged particle or a set of charged particles forming a jet. Predictions of several QCD-inspired models as implemented in PYTHIA are compared, after full detector simulation, to the data. The models generally predict too little production of charged hadrons with pseudorapidity eta < 2, p_T > 0.5 GeV/c, and azimuthal direction transverse to that of the leading object.
This publication describes the methods used to measure the centrality of inelastic Pb-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon pair with ALICE. The centrality is a key parameter in the study of the properties of QCD matter at extreme temperature and energy density, because it is directly related to the initial overlap region of the colliding nuclei. Geometrical properties of the collision, such as the number of participating nucleons and number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, are deduced from a Glauber model with a sharp impact parameter selection, and shown to be consistent with those extracted from the data. The centrality determination provides a tool to compare ALICE measurements with those of other experiments and with theoretical calculations.
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