Longitudinal asymmetry and its effect on pseudorapidity distributions in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV

Abstract

First results on the longitudinal asymmetry and its effect on the pseudorapidity distributions in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider are obtained with the ALICE detector. The longitudinal asymmetry arises because of an unequal number of participating nucleons from the two colliding nuclei, and is estimated for each event by measuring the energy in the forward neutron-Zero-Degree-Calorimeters (ZNs). The effect of the longitudinal asymmetry is measured on the pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles in the regions $|\eta |<0.9$, $2.8<\eta <5.1$ and $-3.7<\eta <-1.7$ by taking the ratio of the pseudorapidity distributions from events corresponding to different regions of asymmetry. The coefficients of a polynomial fit to the ratio characterise the effect of the asymmetry. A Monte Carlo simulation using a Glauber model for the colliding nuclei is tuned to reproduce the spectrum in the ZNs and provides a relation between the measurable longitudinal asymmetry and the shift in the rapidity ($y_0$) of the participant zone formed by the unequal number of participating nucleons. The dependence of the coefficient of the linear term in the polynomial expansion, $c_1$, on the mean value of $y_0$ is investigated.

21 pages, 9 captioned figures, authors from page 16, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/4088

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Cited by in corpus (4)

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• Effects of the $\alpha$-cluster structure and the intrinsic momentum component of nuclei on the longitudinal asymmetry in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Cumulants from fluctuating width of rapidity distribution
• Longitudinal asymmetry in heavy ion collisions at RHIC