Wounded nucleon, quark and quark-diquark emission functions versus experimental results from RHIC

Abstract

Using the wounded nucleon, quark, and quark-diquark models, we extract the wounded source emission functions from the PHOBOS data for d+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV. We apply these models to compute charged particle multiplicity distributions as functions of pseudorapidity for p+p, p+Al, p+Au, d+Au, $^3$He+Au, Cu+Cu, Cu+Au, Au+Au, and U+U collisions at the same energy and compare them with experimental data from the PHOBOS and PHENIX collaborations. In symmetric collisions of heavy nuclei, the obtained distributions differ among the tested models. On the other hand, in asymmetric collisions, all three models give essentially the same distributions. The wounded quark-diquark and quark models are in reasonable agreement with data for all the investigated systems.