Scaling Behaviour of <i>dN</i>/<i>dy</i> in High-Energy Collisions

Abstract

From a recently found family of analytic, finite and accelerating 1+1-dimensional solutions to perfect fluid relativistic hydrodynamics, we derive simple and powerful formulae to describe the rapidity and pseudorapidity density distributions. By introducing a new scaling function, we notice that the rapidity distribution data of the different experiments all collapse into a single curve. This data-collapsing (or -scaling) behaviour in the rapidity distributions suggests that high-energy p+p collisions may be described as collective systems.

Keywords

• heavy-ion physics
• rapidity distribution
• scaling
• hydrodynamics
• exact solutions
• data collapsing