Soft QCD Physics at the LHC: highlights and opportunities

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland became operational in 2009 and has since then produced a plethora of results for proton-proton (pp) collisions. This short review covers results that relates to soft QCD focusing on non-diffractive physics at mid-rapidity. Most of the presented results comes from transverse momentum ($p_{\mathrm{T}}$) spectra and related/derived observables such as multiplicity, $⟨p_{\mathrm{T}}⟩$ and ratios, but also the observed ``ridge'' and the questions of quark-gluon plasma in pp collisions will be discussed. The goal of the review is on one hand to introduce the topics and provide references for scientists joining the LHC program while at the same time highlighting what we consider the most interesting results and open questions to inspire novel measurements.

25 pages, 5 figures. Invited review prepared for Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science

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