A measurement is presented of the charged hadron multiplicity in hadronic PbPb collisions, as a function of pseudorapidity and centrality, at a collision energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair. The data sample is collected using the CMS detector and a minimum-bias trigger, with the CMS solenoid off. The number of charged hadrons is measured both by counting the number of reconstructed particle hits and by forming hit doublets of pairs of layers in the pixel detector. The two methods give consistent results. The charged hadron multiplicity density dN(ch)/d eta, evaluated at eta=0 for head-on collisions, is found to be 1612 +/- 55, where the uncertainty is dominated by systematic effects. Comparisons of these results to previous measurements and to various models are also presented.
Isolated photon production is measured in proton-proton and lead-lead collisions at nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energies of 2.76 TeV in the pseudorapidity range |eta|<1.44 and transverse energies ET between 20 and 80 GeV with the CMS detector at the LHC. The measured ET spectra are found to be in good agreement with next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD predictions. The ratio of PbPb to pp isolated photon ET-differential yields, scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions, is consistent with unity for all PbPb reaction centralities.
The transverse momentum spectra of charged particles have been measured in pp and PbPb collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 2.76 TeV by the CMS experiment at the LHC. In the transverse momentum range pt = 5-10 GeV/c, the charged particle yield in the most central PbPb collisions is suppressed by up to a factor of 5 compared to the pp yield scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions. At higher pt, this suppression is significantly reduced, approaching roughly a factor of 2 for particles with pt in the range pt=40-100 GeV/c.
The anisotropy of the azimuthal distributions of charged particles produced in PbPb collisions with a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is studied with the CMS experiment at the LHC. The elliptic anisotropy parameter defined as the second coefficient in a Fourier expansion of the particle invariant yields, is extracted using the event-plane method, two- and four-particle cumulants, and Lee--Yang zeros. The anisotropy is presented as a function of transverse momentum (pt), pseudorapidity (eta) over a broad kinematic range: 0.3 < pt < 20 GeV, abs(eta) < 2.4, and in 12 classes of collision centrality from 0 to 80%. The results are compared to those obtained at lower center-of-mass energies, and various scaling behaviors are examined. When scaled by the geometric eccentricity of the collision zone, the elliptic anisotropy is found to obey a universal scaling with the transverse particle density for different collision systems and center-of-mass energies.
Forum