Centrality and pseudorapidity dependence of the transverse energy density in pPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} =$ 5.02 TeV

Abstract

The almost hermetic coverage of the CMS detector is used to measure the distribution of transverse energy, $E_\mathrm{T}$, over 13.2 units of pseudorapidity, $η$, for pPb collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} =$ 5.02 TeV. The huge angular acceptance exploits the fact that the CASTOR calorimeter at $-6.6$ $<$ $η$ $<$ $-5.2$ is effectively present on both sides of the colliding system because of a switch in the proton-going and lead-going beam directions. This wide acceptance enables the study of correlations between well-separated angular regions and makes the measurement a particularly powerful test of event generators. For minimum bias pPb collisions the maximum value of d$E_\mathrm{T}/$d$η$ is 22 GeV, which implies an $E_\mathrm{T}$ per participant nucleon pair comparable to that of peripheral PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} =$ 2.76 TeV. The increase of d$E_\mathrm{T}/$d$η$ with centrality is much stronger for the lead-going side than for the proton-going side. The $η$ dependence of d$E_\mathrm{T}/$d$η$ is sensitive to the $η$ range in which the centrality variable is defined. Several modern generators are compared to these results but none is able to capture all aspects of the $η$ and centrality dependence of the data and the correlations observed between different $η$ regions.