Limiting fragmentation in heavy-ion collisions and percolation of strings

The observed limiting fragmentation of charged particle distributions in heavy ion collisions is difficult to explain as it does not apply to the proton spectrum itself. On the other hand, string percolation provides a mechanism to regenerate fast particles, eventually compensating the rapidity shift (energy loss) of the nucleons. However a delicate energy-momentum compensation is required, and in our framework we see no reason for limiting fragmentation to be exact. A prediction, based on percolation arguments, is given for the charged particle density in the full rapidity interval at LHC energy $(\sqrt s =5500 GeV)$.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures (2 eps files), late

Critical issues in ionospheric data quality and implications for scientific studies

Ionospheric data are valuable records of the behavior of the ionosphere, solar activity, and the entire Sun-Earth system. The data are critical for both societally important services and scientific investigations of upper atmospheric variability. This work investigates some of the difficulties and pitfalls in maintaining long-term records of geophysical measurements. This investigation focuses on the ionospheric parameters contained in the historical data sets within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Geophysical Data Center and Space Physics Interactive Data Resource databases. These archives include data from approximately 100 ionosonde stations worldwide, beginning in the early 1940s. Our study focuses on the quality and consistency of ionosonde data accessible via the primary Space Physics Interactive Data Resource node located within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Geophysical Data Center and the World Data Center for Solar-Terrestrial Physics located in Boulder, Colorado. We find that, although the Space Physics Interactive Data Resource archives contained an impressive amount of high-quality data, specific problems existed involving missing and noncontiguous data sets, long-term variations or changes in methodologies and analysis procedures used, and incomplete documentation. The important lessons learned from this investigation are that the data incorporated into an archive must have clear traceability back to the primary source, including scientific validation by the contributors, and that the historical records must have associated metadata that describe relevant nuances in the observations. Although this report only focuses on historical ionosonde data in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration databases, we feel that these findings have general applicability to environmental scientists interested in using long-term geophysical data sets for climate and global change research.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Percolation Effects in Very High Energy Cosmic Rays

Most QCD models of high energy collisions predict that the inelasticity $K$ is an increasing function of the energy. We argue that, due to percolation of strings, this behaviour will change and, at $\sqrt{s} \simeq 10^4$ GeV, the inelasticity will start to decrease with the energy. This has straightforward consequences in high energy cosmic ray physics: 1) the relative depth of the shower maximum $\bar{X}$ grows faster with energy above the knee; 2) the energy measurements of ground array experiments at GZK energies could be overestimated.Comment: Correction of equation (19) and figures 3 and 4. 4 pages, 4 figure

Particle production azimuthal asymmetries in a clustering of color sources model

The collective interactions of many partons in the first stage of the collisions is the usual accepted explanation of the sizable elliptical flow. The clustering of color sources provides a framework of partonic interactions. In this scheme, we show a reasonable agreement with RHIC data for pT<1.5 GeV/c in both the dependence of v2 transverse momentum and in the shape of the nuclear modified factor on the azimuthal angle for different centralities. We show the predictions at LHC energies for Pb-Pb. In the case of proton-proton collisions a sizable v2 is obtained at this energy.Comment: To appear in Journal of Physics

Deconfinement and degrees of freedom in pppp and A−AA-A collisions at LHC energies

We present the extraction of the temperature by analyzing the charged particle transverse momentum spectra in lead-lead (Pb-Pb) and proton-proton (${\bf pp}$) collisions at LHC energies from the ALICE Collaboration using the Color String Percolation Model (CSPM). From the measured energy density ${\bm \varepsilon}$ and the temperature T the dimensionless quantity ${\bm \varepsilon/}T^{4}$ is obtained to get the degrees of freedom (DOF), ${\bm \varepsilon}/T^{4}$ = DOF ${ \pi^{2}}$/30. We observe for the first time a two-step behavior in the increase of DOF, characteristic of deconfinement, above the hadronization temperature at temperature $\sim$ 210 MeV for both Pb-Pb and ${\bf pp}$ collisions and a sudden increase to the ideal gas value of $\sim$ 47 corresponding to three quark flavors in the case of Pb-Pb collisions.Comment: 7 pages and 4 figure

Forward production of beauty baryons in pp collisions at LHC

The production of charmed and beauty baryons in proton-proton collisions at high energies is analyzed within the modified quark-gluon string model. We present some predictions for the experiments on the forward beauty baryon production in pp collisions at LHC energies. This analysis allows us to find useful information on the Regge trajectories of the heavy (b barb) mesons and the sea beauty quark distributions in the proton.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure