Study of charged-particle multiplicity fluctuations in pp collisions with Monte Carlo event generators at the LHC

Abstract

Proton–Proton ([Formula: see text]) collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are simulated in order to study events with a high local density of charged particles produced in narrow pseudorapidty windows of [Formula: see text] = 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5. The [Formula: see text] collisions are generated at center of mass energies of [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] TeV, i.e., the energies at which the LHC has operated so far, using PYTHIA and HERWIG event generators. We have also studied the average of the maximum charged-particle density versus the event multiplicity for all events, using the different pseudorapidity windows. This study prepares for the multi-particle production background expected in a future search for anomalous high-density multiplicity fluctuations using the LHC data.