Constraining high energy interaction mechanisms by studying forward hadron production at the LHC

Abstract

We demonstrate that underlying assumptions concerning the structure of constituent parton Fock states in hadrons make a strong impact on the predictions of hadronic interaction models for forward hadron spectra and for long-range correlations between central and forward hadron production. Our analysis shows that combined studies of proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider by central and forward-looking detectors have a rich potential for discriminating between the main model approaches.