A unified description of the reaction dynamics from pp to pA to AA collisions

There is little doubt that in heavy ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC, we observe a hydrodynamically expanding system, providing strong evidence for the formation of a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) in the early stage of such collisions. These observations are mainly based on results on azimuthal anisotropies, but also on particle spectra of identified particles, perfectly compatible with a hydrodynamic evolution. Surprisingly, in p-Pb collisions one observes a very similar behavior, and to some extent even in p-p. We take these experimental observations as a strong support for a unified approach to describe proton-proton (p-p), proton-nucleus (p-A), and nucleus-nucleus (A-A) collisions, with a plasma formation even in tiny systems as in p-p scatterings.

Analysing radial flow features in p-Pb and p-p collisions at several TeV by studying identified particle production in EPOS3

Experimental transverse momentum spectra of identified particles in p-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV show many similarities to the corresponding Pb-Pb results, the latter ones usually being interpreted in term of hydrodynamic flow. We analyse these data using EPOS3, an event generator based on a 3D+1 viscous hydrodynamical evolution starting from flux tube initial conditions, which are generated in the Gribov-Regge multiple scattering framework. An individual scattering is referred to as Pomeron, identified with a parton ladder, eventually showing up as flux tubes (or strings). Each parton ladder is composed of a pQCD hard process, plus initial and final state linear parton emission. Nonlinear effects are considered by using saturation scales $Q_{s}$, depending on the energy and the number of participants connected to the Pomeron in question. We compute transverse momentum ($p_{t}$) spectra of pions, kaons, protons, lambdas, and $Xi$ baryons in p-Pb and p-p scattering, compared to experimental data and many other models. In this way we show in a quantitative fashion that p-Pb data (and even p-p ones) show the typical ``flow effect of enhanced particle production at intermediate $p_{t}$ values, more and more visible with increasing hadron mass.