Eur. Phys. J. C (2018) 78:427
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-5924-8
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Monte Carlo Glauber model with meson cloud: predictions for
5.44 TeV Xe + Xe collisions
B. G. Zakharov
a
L.D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, GSP-1, 117940, Kosygina Str. 2, 117334 Moscow, Russia
Received: 15 April 2018 / Accepted: 19 May 2018
© The Author(s) 2018
Abstract We study, within the Monte-Carlo Glauber model,
centrality dependence of the midrapidity charged multiplicity
density dN
ch
/dη and of the anisotropy coefficients ε
2,3
in Pb
+ Pb collisions at
√
s = 5.02 TeV and in Xe + Xe collisions
at
√
s = 5.44 TeV. Calculations are performed for versions
with and without nucleon meson cloud. The fraction of the
binary collisions, α, has been fitted to the data on dN
ch
/dη in
Pb + Pb collisions. We obtain α ≈ 0.09(0.13) with (without)
meson cloud. The effect of meson cloud on the dN
ch
/dη is
relatively small. For Xe + Xe collisions for 0–5% centrality
bin we obtain dN
ch
/dη ≈ 1149 and 1134 with and without
meson cloud, respectively. We obtain ε
2
(Xe)/ε
2
(Pb) ∼ 1.45
for most central collisions, and ε
2
(Xe)/ε
2
(Pb) close to unity
at c
∼
>
20%. We find a noticeable increase of the eccentricity
in Xe + Xe collisions at small centralities due to the prolate
shape of the Xe nucleus. The triangularity in Xe + Xe col-
lisions is bigger than in Pb + Pb collisions at c
∼
<
70%. We
obtain ε
3
(Xe)/ε
3
(Pb) ∼ 1.3atc
∼
<
1%.
1 Introduction
It is believed that production of soft particles in AA colli-
sions at RHIC and LHC energies occurs via formation of the
quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that expands hydrodynamically
as a near-ideal liquid [1,2]. Hydrodynamic models have been
successfully used for description of the data from RHIC and
LHC on centrality dependence of hadron multiplicities and
flow effects in AA collisions. The currently available LHC
data on AA collisions have been obtained for Pb + Pb colli-
sions at
√
s = 2.76 and 5.02 TeV. Recently at the LHC there
has been performed a run for Xe + Xe collisions (A = 129)
at
√
s = 5.44 TeV. The data from this run will allow to
study variation of the A-dependence of soft hadron produc-
tion in AA collisions. One can expect that the flow effects
for Xe + Xe collisions should be stronger than for Pb + Pb
a
e-mail: bgz@itp.ac.ru
collisions because fluctuations in the initial entropy density
should increase for nuclei with a smaller nucleon number. For
this reason the data on Xe + Xe collisions are of great inter-
est for testing the hydrodynamic picture of the QGP fireball
evolution. The Xe + Xe collisions at
√
s = 5.44 TeV have
been discussed recently in Refs. [3,4].
The hydrodynamic simulations of AA collisions require
imposing the initial conditions for the entropy/energy distri-
bution at the QGP production time τ
0
∼ 0.5−1fm[5,6]. One
of the popular approach for setting the initial conditions for
the QGP fireball in AAcollisions is the Monte-Carlo Glauber
(MCG) wounded nucleon model [7–10]. In Refs. [11,12]
we have developed a version of the MCG wounded nucleon
model for nucleons with meson cloud. The meson-baryon
Fock components of the nucleon play an important role in
the flavor dependence of nucleon parton distribution func-
tions (PDFs) in deep inelastic scattering [13], and allow to
explain the violation of the Gottfried sum rule [13]. It is
important that, similarly to the wounded nucleon model with
constituent quarks [14–19], the meson degrees of freedom
lead to a nonlinear increase of dN
ch
(AA)/dη with the num-
ber of the wounded nucleons [12]. This effect should emerge
independently of the specific mechanism of inelastic inter-
actions. It is important that, contrary to the MCG models
with the quark subnucleon degrees of freedom, the inter-
action of the meson components is better understood, say,
within the quark-gluon string model [20,21]. Similarly to the
ordinary two-component MCG model without meson cloud
[9] the model [11,12] accounts for the contributions from
soft interaction (participant wounded nucleons) and from
hard binary collisions [22]. However, the results of Refs.
[11,12] show that in the presence of the meson-baryon Fock
components the required fraction of the binary collisions, α,
becomes smaller. The results of Ref. [12] show that the meson
cloud may improve somewhat agreement with the data on the
dependence of the elliptic flow on the charged multiplicity for
very small centralities defined via the ZDCs signals for col-
123