Gluon saturation and energy dependence of hadron multiplicity in pp and AA collisions at the LHC

Abstract

The recent results in \sqrt{s}=2.76 TeV Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported by the ALICE collaboration shows that the power-law energy-dependence of charged hadron multiplicity in Pb+Pb collisions is significantly different from p+p collisions. We show that this different energy-dependence can be explained by inclusion of a strong angular-ordering in the gluon-decay cascade within the Color-Glass-Condensate (or gluon saturation) approach. This effect is more important in nucleus-nucleus collisions where the saturation scale is larger than 1 GeV. Our prescription gives a good description of the LHC data both in p+p and Pb+Pb collisions.

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures; v2: references added, results unchanged, discussion added about the centrality dependence of average transverse momentum over the charged-particle multiplicity at RHIC and the LHC. The version to appear in Phys. Rev. D