No Arabic abstract
If the fundamental planck scale is near a TeV, then parton collisions with high enough center-of-mass energy should produce black holes. The production rate for such black holes at LHC has been extensively studied for the case of a proton-proton collision. In this paper, we extend this analysis to a lead-lead collision at LHC. We find that the cross section for small black holes which may in principle be produced in such a collision is either enhanced or suppressed, depending upon the black hole mass. For example, for black holes with a mass around 3 TeV we find that the differential black hole production cross section, dsigma/dM, in a typical lead-lead collision is up to 90 times larger than that for black holes produced in a typical proton-proton collision. We also discuss the cross-sections for `string ball production in these collisions. For string balls of mass about 1 (2) TeV, we find that the differential production cross section in a typical lead-lead collision may be enhanced by a factor up to 3300 (850) times that of a proton-proton collision at LHC.
If the fundamental Planck scale is near a TeV, then TeV scale black holes should be produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC where sqrt{s} = 14 TeV. As the temperature of the black holes can be ~ 1 TeV we also expect production of Higgs bosons from them via Hawking radiation. This is a different production mode for the Higgs boson, which would normally be produced via direct pQCD parton fusion processes. In this paper we compare total cross sections and transverse momentum distributions dsigma/dp_T for Higgs production from black holes at the LHC with those from direct parton fusion processes at next-to-next-to-leading order and next-to-leading order respectively. We find that the Higgs production from black holes can be larger or smaller than the direct pQCD production depending upon the Planck mass and black hole mass. We also find that dsigma/dp_T of Higgs production from black holes increases as a function of p_T which is in sharp contrast with the pQCD predictions where dsigma/dp_T decreases so we suggest that the measurement of an increase in dsigma/dp_T as p_T increases for Higgs (or any other heavy particle) production can be a useful signature for black holes at the LHC.
LHC is expected to be a top quark factory. If the fundamental Planck scale is near a TeV, then we also expect the top quarks to be produced from black holes via Hawking radiation. In this paper we calculate the cross sections for top quark production from black holes at the LHC and compare it with the direct top quark cross section via parton fusion processes at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). We find that the top quark production from black holes can be larger or smaller than the pQCD predictions at NNLO depending upon the Planck mass and black hole mass. Hence the observation of very high rates for massive particle production (top quarks, higgs or supersymmetry) at the LHC may be an useful signature for black hole production.
We provide a comprehensive comparison of W/Z vector boson production data in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC with predictions obtained using the nCTEQ15 PDFs. We identify the measurements which have the largest potential impact on the PDFs, and estimate the effect of including these data using a Monte Carlo reweighting method. We find this data set can provide information about both the nuclear corrections and the heavy flavor (strange) PDF components. As the proton flavor determination is dependent on nuclear corrections (from heavy target DIS, for example), this information can also help improve the proton PDFs.
We present a systematic theoretical analysis of the ALICE measurement of low-$p_T$ direct-photon production in central lead-lead collisions at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of $sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV. Using next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD, we compute the relative contributions to prompt-photon production from different initial and final states and the theoretical uncertainties coming from independent variations of the renormalisation and factorisation scales, the nuclear parton densities and the fragmentation functions. Based on different fits to the unsubtracted and prompt-photon subtracted ALICE data, we consistently find an exponential, possibly thermal, photon spectrum from the quark-gluon plasma (or hot medium) with slope $T=304pm 58$ MeV and $309pm64$ MeV at $p_Tin[0.8;2.2]$ GeV and $p_Tin[1.5;3.5]$ GeV as well as a power-law ($p_T^{-4}$) behavior for $p_T>4$ GeV as predicted by QCD hard scattering.
We have performed a systematic study of $J/psi$ and $psi(2S)$ production in $p-p$ collisions at different LHC energies and at different rapidities using the leading order (LO) non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) model of heavy quarkonium production. We have included the contributions from $chi_{cJ}$ ($J$ = 0, 1, 2) and $psi(2S)$ decays to $J/psi$. The calculated values have been compared with the available data from the four experiments at LHC namely, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. In case of ALICE, inclusive $J/psi$ and $psi(2S)$ cross-sections have been calculated by including the feed-down from $B$ meson using Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm (FONLL) formalism. It is found that all the experimental cross-sections are well reproduced for $p_T >$ 4 GeV within the theoretical uncertainties arising due to the choice of the factorization scale. We also predict the transverse momentum distributions of $J/psi$ and $psi(2S)$ both for the direct and feed-down processes at the upcoming LHC energies of $sqrt{s} =$ 5.1 TeV and 13 TeV for the year 2015.