Diffractive and non-diffractive wounded nucleons and final states in pA collisions

Understand

We review the state-of-the-art of Glauber-inspired models for estimating the distribution of the number of participating nucleons in pA and AA collisions.

• We argue that there is room for improvement in these models when it comes to the treatment of diffractive excitation processes, and present a new simple Glauber-like model where these processes are better taken into account.
• We also suggest a new way of using the number of participating, or wounded, nucleons to extrapolate event characteristics from pp collisions, and hence get an estimate of basic hadronic final-state properties in pA collisions, which may be used to extract possible nuclear effects.
• The new method is inspired by the Fritiof model, but based on the full, semi-hard multiparton interaction model of Pythia 8.