1 Introduction
According to the Big Bang theory, under the extremely high temperature and high energy density in the early stage of the universe, the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), a new form of matter, was generated by the release of quarks and gluons that had been bound in hadrons by the strong interaction. The masses of the heavy-flavor quarks, mc ˜ 1.3 GeV/c2 and mb ˜ 4.8 GeV/c2, are larger than those of light quarks and the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) energy scale (ΛQCD). Therefore, the generation of heavy-flavor quarks requires sufficiently large energy and momentum transfer by initial hard scattering in heavy-ion collisions and can be calculated using perturbation QCD [1, 2]. Heavy-flavor quarks have a high probability of undergoing relatively complete evolution in QCD materials; thus, they are ideal probes to study the properties of the QGP in heavy-ion collisions. In particular, it is crucial to study the interaction between heavy-flavor quarks and the medium by measuring the nuclear modification factor, flow, and production yield of charmed mesons [3-12].
The transverse momentum (pT) spectra of identified particles provide valuable data for discoveries based on relativistic heavy-ion collisions [13, 14]. The Boltzmann–Gibbs blast-wave model, which has a compact set of parameters, namely, temperature (T) and flow velocity (β), has shown that the spectral shape is sensitive to the dynamics of nucleus-nucleus (AA) collisions [13, 15] and can be used to describe the transverse momentum distributions of light-flavor hadrons with different masses. Moreover, the Tsallis blast-wave model, which includes the fluctuation of the initial conditions in the hydrodynamic evolution on an event-by-event basis, has been used to study the π±, K±, p(
We present the Tsallis–Pareto distribution formula and explain the physical origin of the relationship between the parameters T and q in Sect. 2 of this article. The analysis procedure and fitting results for charmed mesons and the thermal temperature after transverse flow correction are also described in this section. In Sect. 3, the results for the 0–10% (central) and 30–50% (semiperipheral) centrality bins in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV and for the 0–10%, 30–50%, and 60–80% (peripheral) centrality bins in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV are presented. In the same section, the results obtained in Pb-Pb collisions are compared with the values of T and q measured in proton-(anti)proton [pp(
2 Tsallis–Pareto distribution and its fit to charmed meson spectra
Much work on high-energy particle collisions has focused on the study of the transverse momentum distributions of outgoing particles. In the low-pT regime of the spectra, the conventional exponential distributions can be used to describe the spectral shape, and the formula, assuming vanishing chemical potential at high energies, is given as
where mT =
The Tsallis–Pareto distribution within the non-extensive statistics in [17] is also used in the current analyses:
where A is a normalizing factor and can reflect the production yield of the hadron pT spectrum. Tq is the temperature in the non-extensive statistical theory; the subscript q is omitted for brevity in the following discussion. Note that Tq can differ from the temperature T in Eq.(1), but its physical meaning should be the same in the limiting case
The correlations between the parameters T and q have been presented in earlier studies [27-30]. Furthermore, the charged particle multiplicity can be derived from the Tsallis–Pareto-distributed transverse momentum, and concrete application to experimental data yields a negative binomial distribution parameter k ˜
where M is the number of particles at energy E.
In the thermodynamic picture, the relationship between T and q can be obtained from Eqs.(3) and (4), assuming that the relative size of the multiplicity fluctuations is constant as in [17]:
Thus, we have the following formula in the current analyses:
This formula is used to measure the relationship between the Tsallis parameters and event multiplicity in charmed meson production for both small and large systems over a wide range of collision energies and hadron transverse momenta, and the results are compared with the corresponding results for light hadrons.
2.1 Application of Tsallis–Pareto distribution to charmed meson spectra
In this study, we analyze the transverse momentum dependence of charmed meson production in pp(
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F001.jpg)
Centrality | Charmed meson | A | T | q | χ2/ndf | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pb-Pb, 2760 | 0–10% | D0 | 1.279± 0.516 | 0.239±0.030 | 1.166± 0.014 | 5.15/6 |
D+ | 1.052± 0.350 | 0.201± 0.024 | 1.180± 0.013 | 9.13/7 | ||
D*+ | 0.515± 0.212 | 0.240±0.031 | 1.179± 0.012 | 2.9/7 | ||
30–50% | D0 | 0.178± 0.076 | 0.278±0.041 | 1.169±0.020 | 0.88/5 | |
D+ | 0.052± 0.025 | 0.322± 0.055 | 1.151±0.025 | 0.51/5 | ||
D*+ | 0.084± 0.045 | 0.250±0.049 | 1.205± 0.025 | 0.34/5 | ||
Pb-Pb, 5020 | 0–10% | D0 | 1.957± 0.551 | 0.240± 0.020 | 1.187±0.008 | 14.95/9 |
D+ | 0.768±0.277 | 0.245± 0.025 | 1.190± 0.008 | 5.16/9 | ||
D*+ | 0.675± 0.209 | 0.258± 0.026 | 1.184±0.010 | 6.12/9 | ||
30–50% | D0 | 0.145± 0.040 | 0.328± 0.026 | 1.175± 0.008 | 2.12/9 | |
D+ | 0.088± 0.024 | 0.311± 0.024 | 1.179± 0.007 | 5.35/9 | ||
D*+ | 0.057± 0.020 | 0.331±0.034 | 1.185± 0.008 | 3.76/9 | ||
60–80% | D0 | 0.010± 0.003 | 0.427± 0.042 | 1.151± 0.012 | 2.52/8 | |
D+ | 0.005± 0.001 | 0.402± 0.043 | 1.170± 0.013 | 2.21/8 | ||
D*+ | 0.004± 0.002 | 0.430± 0.069 | 1.156± 0.017 | 4.48/8 | ||
pp, 200 | D0+D* | 3.8e-4 ± 5.3e-5 | 0.322± 0.022 | 1.081± 0.011 | 4.39/7 | |
pp, 500 | D0+D* | 6.8e-4 ± 1.7e-4 | 0.310± 0.020 | 1.132± 0.006 | 4.13/10 | |
p( |
D0 | 1.8e-3±1.7e-3 | 0.386± 0.058 | 1.143± 0.011 | 0.87/3 | |
pp, 7000 | D0 | 1.6e-3 ± 7.6e-4 | 0.494± 0.062 | 1.139± 0.023 | 1.75/6 |
In Fig. 2, the fits are applied to the transverse momentum distributions of charmed mesons for different centrality bins in AA collisions [49-52]. The fits of the transverse momentum distributions of prompt D0, D+, and D*+ mesons in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV are shown in Fig. 2(a). Solid circles, diamonds, and triangles represent D0, D+, and D*+, respectively. The 0–10% (solid) and 30–50% (open) centrality bins are shown in Fig. 2(a) [49], where the D0 and D*+ production yields at 0–10% and 30–50% are scaled by factors of 10 and 0.05, respectively. For the 0–10% centrality bin, fits are performed in the range 0 < pT < 20.0 GeV/c for D0 and in the range 0 < pT < 30.0 GeV/c for D+ and D*+. For the 30–50% centrality bin, the same fitting procedures were performed in the range 0 < pT < 14.0 GeV/c for D0, D+, and D*+. The vertical bars represent the sums of the statistical and systematic uncertainties. Table 1 shows that the fit parameters of the charmed meson spectra in the 0–10% centrality bin have smaller uncertainties with more data points than those in the 30–50% centrality bin at 2.76 TeV.
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F002.jpg)
Figure 2(b), (c), and (d) show the transverse momentum distributions dN/dpT of D0 mesons (solid circles), D+ mesons (diamonds), and D*+ mesons (triangles) in the 0–10%, 30–50%, and 60–80% centrality bins, respectively, in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV [50]. The vertical bars represent the quadratic sums of the statistical and systematic uncertainties, and symbols are placed at the center of the bin. The solid curves representing the Tsallis–Pareto distributions describe the data well. For visibility, the D0 and D*+ distributions in the three centrality bins are scaled by factors of 10 and 1/10, respectively. To more physically constrain the D+ and D*+ yields at pT = 1.5 GeV/c, we applied a D+/D0 and D*+/D0 ratio of approximately 0.5 from PYTHIA and performed the fit. The ratio obtained from PYTHIA is consistent with the experimental data [50]. The fitted T, q, and A parameters and χ2/ndf values are listed in Table 1 . The T and q parameters after transverse flow correction are shown in Fig. 5. In addition, we also applied the same Tsallis–Pareto fits to the transverse momentum spectra of π±, K±, and p(
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F005.jpg)
2.2 Thermal temperature with flow correction
The phenomenological model can describe almost all hadronic spectra by beginning with thermalization and collective flow as basic assumptions [15]. The mass dependence of the effective temperature T has been described by introducing a Gaussian parameterization [53-56] and can be interpreted as the presence of a radial flow. The velocity of the radial flow, which is generated by violent nucleon-nucleon collisions in two colliding nuclei and developed in both the QGP phase and hadronic rescattering, increases the transverse momentum of particles in proportion to their mass [15, 57, 58]. Many models have been used to investigate the radial flow [59]; a radial flow model [15, 58] we can use in this analysis is written as
where Tfro is the hadron kinetic freeze-out temperature, and 〈ut〉 is a measure of the strength of the (average radial) transverse flow. The relationship between the average transverse velocity 〈βt〉 and 〈ut〉 is given as
Note that although the T value according to the non-extensive statistical theory can differ from the usual temperature in Eq.(1), the flow correction of the spectral temperatures is independent of the statistical model. In addition, the following function is used to study the collectivity of charmed mesons produced in heavy-ion collisions [5]:
where m0 is the rest mass of the hadron species. This method is used to analyze the charmed meson spectra and to understand the collective velocity of the radial flow from the data in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV. The function in Eq.(9) is applied to the π, K, p(
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F003.jpg)
The fitted Tsallis–Pareto T parameters in Sect. 2.1 are plotted as a function of the corresponding masses of π±, K±, and p(
Figure 4 reveals that the multiplicity dependence of the average radial flow velocity is linear as a function of log 〈dNch/dη〉. Furthermore, the average radial flow velocity increases with increasing multiplicity, which is consistent with an earlier blast-wave analysis [17]. In addition, the values can be extracted for π±, K±, and p(
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F004.jpg)
The linear dependence for charmed mesons is
3 Results and discussion
The measured transverse momentum distributions of charmed mesons in pp(
The non-extensive feature q ≠ 1 appears in Table 1 . To obtain a more physical understanding of this result, the dependence of the parameter q on the size of the collisional system is represented diagrammatically in Fig. 5. In addition, the spectral temperature T obtained from the Tsallis–Pareto fit of the hadron spectrum is larger than the original temperature Tthermal by a blue-shift factor owing to the presence of a radial flow [15]. The ordinate in Fig. 5 shows the thermal temperature values obtained by flow correction of the spectral temperatures for different hadron species. The flow correction formalism is given as
where βt is given by Eq.(10) for π±, K±, and p(
Figure 5 shows the T–(q-1) parameter space for π±, K±, p(
Hadron | E (GeV) | ζ2 | χ2/ndf | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pb-Pb, 2760 | charmed mesons | 3.000± 2.225 | 0.226± 0.055 | 2.11/4 |
π± | 0.329± 0.022 | 0.374± 0.017 | 7.27/8 | |
K± | 0.362± 0.014 | 0.470±0.016 | 15.91/8 | |
p( |
0.901± 0.036 | 0.270± 0.011 | 11.04/8 | |
Pb-Pb, 5020 | charmed mesons | 4.800± 1.460 | 0.221± 0.015 | 1.85/7 |
π± | 0.237± 0.027 | 0.478± 0.040 | 4.68/8 | |
K± | 0.407± 0.024 | 0.441± 0.018 | 2.53/8 | |
p( |
0.982± 0.049 | 0.271± 0.010 | 0.62/8 |
We find that the Tsallis–Pareto distributions can provide satisfactory descriptions in a wide range of transverse momentum dependence of charmed meson production in pp(
(i) There is a significant linear relationship between the thermal temperature and Tsallis q parameter for π±, K±, p(
(ii) Charmed mesons have a significantly higher slope than light hadrons. The temperature of charmed mesons is found to be higher than that of light hadrons at the same q-1, indicating that heavy flavor requires a higher temperature to reach the same degree of non-extensivity as light flavors in heavy-ion collisions. The slope of a given hadron is smaller at 2.76 TeV than at 5.02 TeV. In Fig. 6, the slopes of the T–(q-1) correlations are plotted as a function of hadron mass for π±, K±, p(
-202110/1001-8042-32-10-006/alternativeImage/1001-8042-32-10-006-F006.jpg)
(iii) The charmed meson results for pp(
4 Summary
We presented fits of the transverse momentum spectra of D0, D+, and D*+ mesons at mid-rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 and 5.02 TeV. A similar analysis with non-extensive statistics was performed to identify light hadron spectra for different centrality bins in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV and 5.02 TeV after flow correction. Charmed meson production can be well described by the Tsallis–Pareto distributions. We observed that in the T–(q-1) parameter space, the slope has a positive dependence on hadron mass. In addition, the temperature of charmed mesons was found to be higher than that of light hadrons at the same q-1, indicating that heavy flavor requires a higher temperature to reach the same degree of non-extensivity as light flavors in heavy-ion collisions. In addition, the slope distribution of the T–(q-1) correlations (Fig. 6) and the anti-correlation between the thermal temperature and centrality for charmed mesons require a deeper theoretical explanation.
For the pp(
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