The NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS is performing a uniqe study of the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter by varying collision energy and nuclear mass number of colliding nuclei. In central Pb+Pb collisions the NA49 experiment found structures in the energy dependence of several observables in the CERN SPS energy range that had been predicted for the transition to a deconfined phase. New measurements of NA61/SHINE find intriguing similarities in p+p interactions for which no deconfinement transition is expected at SPS energies. Possible implications will be discussed.
Measurements of multiplicity and transverse momentum fluctuations of charged particles were performed in inelastic p+p interactions at 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c beam momentum. Results for the scaled variance of the multiplicity distribution and fo
r three strongly intensive measures of multiplicity and transverse momentum fluctuations $Delta[P_{T},N]$, $Sigma[P_{T},N]$ and $Phi_{p_T}$ are presented. For the first time the results on fluctuations are fully corrected for experimental biases. The results on multiplicity and transverse momentum fluctuations significantly deviate from expectations for the independent particle production. They also depend on charges of selected hadrons. The string-resonance Monte Carlo models EPOS and UrQMD do not describe the data. The scaled variance of multiplicity fluctuations is significantly higher in inelastic p+p interactions than in central Pb+Pb collisions measured by NA49 at the same energy per nucleon. This is in qualitative disagreement with the predictions of the Wounded Nucleon Model. Within the statistical framework the enhanced multiplicity fluctuations in inelastic p+p interactions can be interpreted as due to event-by-event fluctuations of the fireball energy and/or volume.
Project Thermalization (Experiment SERP-E-190 at IHEP) is aimed to study the proton - proton interactions at 50 GeV with large number of secondary particles. In this report the experimentally measured topological cross sections are presented taking i
nto account the detector response and procession efficiency. These data are in good agreement with gluon dominance model. The comparison with other models is also made and shows no essential discrepancies.
Measurements of multiplicity fluctuations of identified hadrons produced in inelastic p+p interactions at 31, 40, 80, and 158~GeVc beam momentum are presented. Three different measures of multiplicity fluctuations are used: the scaled variance $omega
$ and strongly intensive measures $Sigma$ and $Delta$. These fluctuation measures involve second and first moments of joint multiplicity distributions. Data analysis is performed using the Identity method which corrects for incomplete particle identification. Strongly intensive quantities are calculated in order to allow for a direct comparison to corresponding results on nucleus-nucleus collisions. The results for different hadron types are shown as a function of collision energy. A comparison with predictions of string-resonance Monte-Carlo models: Epos, Smash and Venus, is also presented.
In this article we present a review of the structure of the proton and the current status of our knowledge of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). The lepton-nucleon scattering experiments which provide the main constraints in PDF extractions ar
e introduced and their measurements are discussed. Particular emphasis is given to the HERA data which cover a wide kinematic region. Hadron-hadron scattering measurements which provide supplementary information are also discussed. The methods used by various groups to extract the PDFs in QCD analyses of hard scattering data are presented and their results are compared. The use of existing measurements allows predictions for cross sections at the LHC to be made. A comparison of these predictions for selected processes is given. First measurements from the LHC experiments are compared to predictions and some initial studies of the impact of this new data on the PDFs are presented.
The momentum spectra of K+ produced at small angles in proton-proton and proton-deuteron collisions have been measured at four beam energies, 1.826, 1.920, 2.020, and 2.650 GeV, using the ANKE spectrometer at COSY-Juelich. After making corrections fo
r Fermi motion and shadowing, the data indicate that K+ production near threshold is stronger in pp- than in pn-induced reactions. However, most of this difference could be made up by the unobserved K0 production in the pn case.