Universal scaling of meson and baryon spectra in p-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV

Abstract

We systematically investigate the scaling property of mesons (pions and kaons) and baryons (protons, ${\rm Λ}$, ${\rm Ξ}$ and ${\rm Ω}$) transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$) spectra at different centrality classes (0-5$\%$, 5-10$\%$, 10-20$\%$, 20-40$\%$, 40-60$\%$, 60-80$\%$ and 80-100$\%$) in proton-lead collisions with center of mass energy per nucleon pair 5.02 TeV. In the low $p_{\rm T}$ region with $p_{\rm{T}}\leq $ 3.9 (3.1, 2.5, 2.7, 2.4 and 2.8) GeV/c, a universal scaling independent of the centrality is observed in the pion (kaon, proton, ${\rm Λ}$, ${\rm Ξ}$ and ${\rm Ω}$) spectra when a dilatation, $p_{\rm T}\rightarrow p_{\rm T}/K$, is applied. Here $K$ is a scaling parameter depending on the centrality class. We find that the rates at which ln$K$ changes with the logarithmic value of the average value of the number of participating nucleons, ln$\langle N_{\rm{part}}\rangle$, are stronger for baryons than those for mesons. In the high $p_{\rm T}$ region, there is a deviation from the scaling. The more peripheral the collisions are, the more obvious the violation of the scaling is. In the framework of the colour string percolation (CSP) model, we show that mesons and baryons are generated from the decay of clusters formed by strings overlapping in the transverse plane with the same size dispersion but with different mean size. The mean size of clusters for baryons is smaller than that of mesons. For the same hadrons at different centrality classes, the mean size of clusters decreases with the increase of centrality. The fragmentation functions for cluster decay are different for different hadrons, while they are universal for the same hadrons at different centrality classes. The universal scaling of the meson and baryon spectra in the low $p_{\rm T}$ region can be quantitatively understood with the CSP model at the same time.