Two-particle angular correlations in pp and p-Pb collisions at LHC energies from a multi-phase transport model

Abstract

We apply a multi-phase transport (AMPT) model to study two-particle angular correlations in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}= 7$ TeV. Besides being able to describe the angular correlation functions of meson-meson pairs, a large improvement for the angular correlations of baryon-baryon and antibaryon-antibaryon is achieved. We further find that the AMPT model with new quark coalescence provides an even better description on the anti-correlation feature of baryon-baryon correlations observed in the experiments. We also extend the study to p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}= 5.02$ TeV and obtained similar results. These results help us better understand the particle production mechanism in $pp$ and p-Pb collisions at LHC energies.