https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2018-12484-7
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Universal scaling of strange particle pT spectra in pp collisions
School of Physics and Information Technology, Shaanxi Normal University, 710119, Xi’an, China
* e-mail: wenchao.zhang@snnu.edu.cn
Received:
6
December
2017
Accepted:
16
February
2018
Published online:
13
April
2018
As a complementary study to that performed on the transverse momentum (
) spectra of charged pions, kaons and protons in proton-proton (pp) collisions at LHC energies 0.9, 2.76 and 7TeV, we present a scaling behaviour in the 
spectra of strange particles (
, 
, 
and 
) at these three energies. This scaling behaviour is exhibited when the spectra are expressed in a suitable scaling variable 
, where the scaling parameter K is determined by the quality factor method and increases with the center of mass energy (
). The rates at which K increases with 
for these strange particles are found to be identical within errors. In the framework of the colour string percolation model, we argue that these strange particles are produced through the decay of clusters that are formed by the colour strings overlapping. We observe that the strange mesons and baryons are produced from clusters with different size distributions, while the strange mesons (baryons) 
and 
(
and 
) originate from clusters with the same size distributions. The cluster’s size distributions for strange mesons are more dispersed than those for strange baryons. The scaling behaviour of the spectra for these strange particles can be explained by the colour string percolation model in a quantitative way.
© SIF, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, 2018
