Centrality evolution of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density over a broad pseudorapidity range in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV

Understand

The centrality dependence of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density measured with ALICE in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ over a broad pseudorapidity range is presented.

• This Letter extends the previous results reported by ALICE to more peripheral collisions.
• No strong change of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density distributions with centrality is observed, and when normalised to the number of participating nucleons in the collisions, the evolution over pseudorapidity with centrality is likewise small.
• The broad pseudorapidity range allows precise estimates of the total number of produced charged particles which we find to range from $162\pm22$ (syst.) to $17170\pm770$ (syst.) in 80-90% and 0-5 central collisions, respectively.