Two components in charged particle production in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Transverse momentum spectra of charged particle production in heavy-ion collisions are considered in terms of a recently introduced Two Component parameterization combining exponential ("soft") and power-law ("hard") functional forms. The charged hadron densities calculated separately for them are plotted versus number of participating nucleons, $N_{part}$. The obtained dependences are discussed and the possible link between the two component parameterization introduced by the authors and the two component model historically used for the case of heavy-ion collisions is established. Next, the variations of the parameters of the introduced approach with the center of mass energy and centrality are studied using the available data from RHIC and LHC experiments. The spectra shapes are found to show universal dependences on $N_{part}$ for all investigated collision energies.