Analysis of Midrapidity pT Distributions of Identified Charged Particles in Pb + Pb Collisions at snn = 5.02 TeV Using Tsallis Distribution with Embedded Transverse Flow

Abstract

The midrapidity transverse momentum distributions of the charged pions, kaons, protons, and antiprotons, measured by ALICE Collaboration at ten centrality classes of Pb + Pb collisions at snn  = 5.02 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, CERN, Switzerland), are successfully analyzed using combined minimum χ2 fits with a thermodynamically non-consistent, as well as thermodynamically consistent, Tsallis function with transverse flow. The extracted non-extensivity parameter q decreases systematically for all considered particle species with increasing Pb + Pb collision centrality, suggesting an increase in the degree of system thermalization with an increase in collision centrality. The results for q suggest quite a large degree of thermalization of quark–gluon plasma (QGP) created in central Pb + Pb collisions at snn = 5.02 TeV with the average number of participant nucleons ⟨Npart⟩ > 160. The obtained significantly different growth rates of transverse flow velocity, ⟨βT⟩, in regions ⟨Npart⟩ < 71 ± 7 and ⟨Npart⟩ > 71 ± 7 with the temperature parameter T0 remaining constant within uncertainties in region ⟨Npart⟩ > 71 ± 7 probably indicates that ⟨Npart⟩ ≈ 71 ± 7 (corresponding to ⟨dNch/dη⟩ ≈ 251 ± 20) is a threshold border value for a crossover transition from a dense hadronic state to the QGP phase (or mixed phase of QGP and hadrons) in Pb + Pb collisions at snn = 5.02 TeV. The threshold border value for transverse flow velocity ⟨βT⟩ ≈ 0.46 ± 0.03 (corresponding to ⟨Npart⟩ ≈ 71 ± 7), estimated by us in Pb + Pb collisions at snn = 5.02 TeV, agrees well with the corresponding border value ⟨βT⟩ ≈ 0.44 ± 0.02, recently obtained in Xe + Xe collisions at snn = 5.44 TeV, and with almost constant ⟨βT⟩ values extracted earlier in the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC, Brookhaven, GA, USA) in central Au + Au collisions in the snn = 7.7 − 39 GeV energy range, where the threshold for QGP production is achieved. The correlations between extracted T0 and ⟨βT⟩ parameters are found to be greatly different in regions ⟨βT⟩ < 0.46 and ⟨βT⟩ > 0.46, which further supports our result obtained for the threshold border value in Pb + Pb collisions at snn = 5.02 TeV.