arXiv subjects

Constantin Loizides

Publications and source records attributed to Constantin Loizides.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A compendium of cold-nuclear matter baseline predictions in light-ion collisions

The recent light-ion collision programme at RHIC and the LHC provides a unique opportunity to investigate the onset of quark-gluon plasma formation and parton energy loss in small systems. A quantitative interpretation of emerging jet quenching measurements requires precise control over cold nuclear matter (CNM) effects, which modify hard-process cross sections independently of any hot-medium dynamics. In this work, we present a comprehensive set of perturbative QCD baseline calculations for nuclear modification factors ($R_{AA}$) in proton-oxygen (pO), oxygen-oxygen (OO) and neon-neon (NeNe) collisions at LHC energies. The study includes charged hadron, neutral pion, prompt photon, and electroweak-boson production computed at next-to-leading order using a broad set of recent nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs). We demonstrate that CNM effects alone can induce sizeable suppressions in light-ion systems, with large associated nPDF uncertainties that currently limit the quantitative extraction of parton energy loss. To address this limitation, we explore a range of multi-cross-section ratios in which CNM effects and their uncertainties largely cancel. In particular, ratios of neutral pion $R_{OO}$ to prompt photon $R_{OO}$ or charged hadron $R_{OO}$ to $R_{pO}^2$ provide theoretically robust observables with substantially reduced nPDF uncertainties, thereby enhancing sensitivity to possible energy-loss signatures.

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arXiv2025

Glauber predictions for oxygen and neon collisions at energies available at the LHC

The Glauber model is a widely used framework for describing the initial conditions in high-energy nuclear collisions. TGlauberMC is a Monte Carlo implementation of this model that enables detailed, event-by-event calculations across various collision systems. In this work, I present an updated version of TGlauberMC (3.3), which incorporates recent theoretical developments and improved parameterizations, especially relevant for small collision systems. I focus on the oxygen-oxygen (OO), neon-neon (NeNe), and proton-oxygen (pO) collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in July 2025, where precise modelling of nuclear geometry and fluctuations is essential. The updated version includes revised nuclear density profiles and an enhanced treatment of nucleon substructure. Geometrical cross sections for all relevant collision systems are calculated and initial-state observables are explored to provide predictions for particle production trends at $\sqrt{s_{\rm nn}}$=5.36 TeV. In particular, a prediction for the centrality dependence of mid-rapidity multiplicity in OO and NeNe collisions is obtained. The updated code is publicly available to support the heavy-ion community with a robust and flexible tool for studying strongly interacting matter in small and intermediate-sized nuclear systems.

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arXiv2025

Selection bias effects on high-$p_\mathrm{T}$ yield and correlation measurements in Oxygen+Oxygen collisions

Oxygen+Oxygen (O+O) collisions at RHIC and the LHC offer a unique experimental opportunity to observe the onset of jet quenching in intermediate relativistic collision systems. As with the smaller proton-nucleus or larger nucleus-nucleus systems, measurements of centrality-selected high-$p_\mathrm{T}$ processes in O+O collisions are expected to be sensitive to selection bias effects, which will be necessary to quantify or mitigate before a definitive conclusion on the presence of jet quenching. Using two Monte Carlo heavy-ion event generators, we provide a survey of centrality bias effects on high-$p_\mathrm{T}$ yield and correlation measurements. Some highlights of our findings include that (1) bias factors for the accessible kinematic range at RHIC show a non-trivial $p_\mathrm{T}$ dependence, compared to a negligible one at the LHC given the smaller accessible Bjorken-$x$ range, (2) centrality definitions based on multiplicity are less sensitive to bias effects than those based on the transverse energy, (3) the Angantyr generator gives qualitatively similar but larger-magnitude bias factors than HIJING, and (4) correlation measurements have a much smaller sensitivity to bias effects than do yield measurements. The findings here are intended to guide the experimental design and interpretation of O+O jet quenching and other hard-process measurements.

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arXiv2022

Absence of jet quenching in peripheral nucleus-nucleus collisions

Medium effects on the production of high-$p_{\rm T}$ particles in nucleus-nucleus (AA) collisions are generally quantified by the nuclear modification factor ($R_{\rm AA}$), defined to be unity in absence of nuclear effects. Modeling particle production including a nucleon-nucleon impact parameter dependence, we demonstrate that $R_{\rm AA}$ at midrapidity in peripheral AA collisions can be significantly affected by event selection and geometry biases. Even without jet quenching and shadowing, these biases cause an apparent suppression for $R_{\rm AA}$ in peripheral collisions, and are relevant for all types of hard probes and all collision energies. Our studies indicate that calculations of jet quenching in peripheral AA collisions should account for the biases, or else they will overestimate the relevance of parton energy loss. Similarly, expectations of parton energy loss in light-heavy collision systems based on comparison with apparent suppression seen in peripheral $R_{\rm AA}$ should be revised. Our interpretation of the peripheral $R_{\rm AA}$ data would unify observations for lighter collision systems or lower energies where significant values of elliptic flow are observed despite the absence of strong jet quenching.

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arXiv2022

Imaging the initial condition of heavy-ion collisions and nuclear structure across the nuclide chart

High-energy nuclear collisions encompass three key stages: the structure of the colliding nuclei informed by low-energy nuclear physics, the initial condition (IC) leading to the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), and the hydrodynamic expansion and hadronization of the QGP leading to final-state hadrons observed experimentally. Recent advances in experimental and theoretical methods have ushered in a precision era, enabling an increasingly accurate understanding of these stages. However, most approaches involve simultaneously determining both QGP properties and initial conditions from a single collision system, creating complexity due to the coupled contributions of various stages to the final-state observables. To avoid this, we propose leveraging known knowledge of low-energy nuclear structure and hydrodynamic observables to constrain the IC independently. By conducting comparative studies of collisions involving isobar-like nuclei - species with similar mass numbers but different structures - we disentangle the initial condition's impacts from the QGP properties. This approach not only refines our understanding of the IC but also turns high-energy experiments into a precision tool for imaging nuclear structures, offering insights that complement traditional low-energy approaches. Opportunities for carrying out such comparative experiments at the LHC and other facilities could significantly advance both high-energy and low-energy nuclear physics. Additionally, this approach has implications for the future EIC. While the possibilities are extensive, we focus on selected proposals that could benefit both the high-energy and low-energy nuclear physics communities. Originally prepared as input for the long-range plan of U.S. nuclear physics, this white paper reflects the status as of September 2022, with a brief update on developments since then.

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arXiv2021

Apparent strangeness enhancement from multiplicity selection in high energy proton-proton collisions

The increase of strange-particle yields relative to pions versus charged-particle multiplicity in proton-proton (pp) collisions at the LHC is usually described by microscopic or hydrodynamical models as a result of the increasing density of produced partons or strings and their interactions. Instead, we consider the multiple partonic interaction (MPI) picture originally developed in the context of the PYTHIA event generator. We find that strangeness enhancement in PYTHIA is hidden by a large excess of low-$p_{\rm T}$ multi-strange baryons, which mainly results from the hadronization of $u$-quark, $d$-quark and gluon ($udg$) strings. Strange baryons produced in strings formed from parton showers initiated by strange quarks ($s$-fragmentation), however, describe well the spectral shapes of $Ξ$ and $Ω$ baryons and their multiplicity dependence. Since the total particle yield contains contributions from soft and hard particle production, which cannot be experimentally separated, we argue that the correct description of the $p_{\rm T}$-spectra is a minimum requirement for meaningful comparisons of multiplicity dependent yield measurements to MPI based calculations. We demonstrate that the $s$-fragmentation component describes the increase of average $p_{\rm T}$ and yields with multiplicity seen in the data, including the approximate multiplicity scaling for different collision energies. When restricted to processes that reproduce the measured $p_{\rm T}$-spectra, the MPI framework exhibits a smooth evolution from strictly proportional multiplicity scaling ($K_{\rm S}^0$, $Λ$, where the $udg$-hadronization component dominates) to linearity ($s$-fragmentation) and on to increasingly non-linear behavior ($c$-, $b$-quark and high-$p_{\rm T}$ jet fragmentation), hence providing a unified approach for particle production in pp collisions.

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arXiv2021

Centrality dependence of electroweak boson production in PbPb collisions at the LHC

Recent data on the nuclear modification of W and Z boson production measured by the ATLAS collaboration in PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm nn}}=5.02$ TeV show an enhancement in peripheral collisions, seemingly contradicting predictions of the Glauber model. The data were previously explained by arguing that the nucleon-nucleon cross section may be shadowed in nucleus-nucleus collisions, and hence suppressed compared to the proton-proton cross section at the same collision energy. This interpretation has quite significant consequences for the understanding of heavy-ion data, in particular in the context of the Glauber model. Instead, we provide an alternative explanation of the data by assuming that there is a mild bias present in the centrality determination of the measurement; on the size of the related systematic uncertainty. Using this assumption, we show that the data is in agreement with theoretical calculations using nuclear parton distribution functions. Finally, we speculate that the centrality dependence of the W$^-$/W$^{+}$ ratio may point to the relevance of a larger skin thickness of the Pb nucleus, which, if present, would result in a few percent larger PbPb cross section than currently accounted for in the Glauber model and may hence be the root of the centrality bias.

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arXiv2020

Progress in the Glauber model at collider energies

We review the theoretical and experimental progress in the Glauber model of multiple nucleon and/or parton scatterings, after the last 10--15 years of operation with proton and nuclear beams at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and with various light and heavy colliding ions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The main developments and the state-of-the-art of the field are summarized. These encompass measurements of the inclusive inelastic proton and nuclear cross sections, advances in the description of the proton and nuclear density profiles and their fluctuations, inclusion of subnucleonic degrees of freedom, experimental procedures and issues related to the determination of the collision centrality, validation of the binary scaling prescription for hard scattering cross sections, and constraints on transport properties of quark-gluon matter from varying initial-state conditions in relativistic hydrodynamics calculations. These advances confirm the validity and usefulness of the Glauber formalism for quantitative studies of QCD matter produced in high-energy collisions of systems, from protons to uranium nuclei, of vastly different size.

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arXiv2020

New opportunities at the photon energy frontier

Ultra-peripheral collisions (UPCs) involving heavy ions and protons are the energy frontier for photon-mediated interactions. UPC photons can be used for many purposes, including probing low-$x$ gluons via photoproduction of dijets and vector mesons, probes of beyond-standard-model processes, such as those enabled by light-by-light scattering, and studies of two-photon production of the Higgs.

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arXiv2020

Applicability of transverse mass scaling in hadronic collisions at the LHC

We present a study on the applicability of transverse mass scaling for identified particle spectra in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV based on data taken by the ALICE experiment at the LHC. The measured yields are parametrized and compared to estimates obtained from a generalized transverse mass scaling approach applied to different reference particle spectra. It is found that generalized transverse mass scaling is not able to describe the measured spectra over the full range in transverse momentum. At low $p_{\rm T}$, deviations of $20$% or more are obtained, in particular if pions are used as reference particles. A better scaling performance is obtained, when kaons are used as reference particles. At high $p_{\rm T}$ all tested spectra with the possible exception of the charged kaons exhibit a scaling behavior. Investigating the feed-down contributions from resonance decays to the charged pion yields reveals, that using them as reference a general scaling may not be achievable. Our findings imply that for precision measurements of direct photon and di-electron spectra at low transverse momentum one should measure the relevant hadronic background, instead of relying on $m_{\rm T}$ scaling for its estimate.

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arXiv2020

"QM19 summary talk": Outlook and future of heavy-ion collisions

A summary of the QM19 conference is given by highlighting a few selected results. These are discussed as examples to illustrate the exciting future of heavy-ion collisions and the need for further instrumentation. (The arXiv version is significantly longer than the printed proceedings, with more figures.)

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arXiv2020

Final-state interactions of the Higgs boson in quark-gluon matter

In the first version of this paper \cite{dEnterria:2018bqi}, we presented a study of the final-state interactions of the Higgs boson in the hot and dense quark-gluon systems produced in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions at CERN LHC and FCC energies. By computing the leading-order diagrams of the Higgs-parton scattering cross sections in perturbative QCD, and by embedding the produced Higgs bosons in an expanding quark-gluon medium modeled with 2D+1 viscous hydrodynamics with various QCD equations of state, we presented estimates of the expected scalar boson yields as functions of transverse momentum $p_{\rm T}^{H}$, and produced medium space-time size. A moderate suppression of the scalar boson yields was predicted due to medium-enhanced $H\to gg,q\bar{q}$ decays, in detriment of the $H\toγγ, 4\ell$ channels that are typically used to observe the Higgs particle. After our work appeared, J. Ghiglieri and U. Wiedemann \cite{Ghiglieri:2019lzz} have presented thermal-field-theory calculations that indicate that the $H\to gg,q\bar{q}$ partial decays widths remain basically unaffected by interactions with surrounding partons in the kinematic range of relevance of our study. Such a theoretical result, in contradiction with our estimates, has brought us to revisit our calculations and to realize of the quantitative importance of thermal virtual corrections, neglected in our first work, that are as large as the real ones and of opposite sign. Such virtual corrections significantly reduce the Higgs-parton "absorption" cross sections originally computed in Ref. \cite{dEnterria:2018bqi}, and make the Higgs boson suppression negligible in the kinematic regime considered.

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arXiv2019

Machine Learning based jet momentum reconstruction in heavy-ion collisions

The precise reconstruction of jet transverse momenta in heavy-ion collisions is a challenging task. A major obstacle is the large number of (mainly) low-$p_{\rm T}$ particles overlaying the jets. Strong region-to-region fluctuations of this background complicate the jet measurement and lead to significant uncertainties. In this paper, a novel approach to correct jet momenta (or energies) for the underlying background in heavy-ion collisions is introduced. The proposed method makes use of common Machine Learning techniques to estimate the jet transverse momentum based on several parameters, including properties of the jet constituents. Using a toy model and HIJING simulations, the performance of the new method is shown to be superior to the established standard area-based background estimator. The application of the new method to data promises the measurement of jets down to extremely low transverse momenta, unprecedented thus far in data on heavy-ion collisions.

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arXiv2019

Improved Monte Carlo Glauber predictions at present and future nuclear colliders

We present the results of an improved Monte Carlo Glauber (MCG) model of relevance for collisions involving nuclei at center-of-mass energies of BNL RHIC ($\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=0.2$ TeV), CERN LHC ($\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=2.76$-$8.8$ TeV), and proposed future hadron colliders ($\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}\approx 10$-$63$ TeV). The inelastic pp cross sections as a function of $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ are obtained from a precise data-driven parametrization that exploits the many available measurements at LHC collision energies. We describe the nuclear transverse profile with two separated 2-parameter Fermi distributions for protons and neutrons to account for their different densities close to the nuclear periphery. Furthermore, we model the nucleon degrees of freedom inside the nucleus through a lattice with a minimum nodal separation, combined with a "recentering and reweighting" procedure, that overcomes some limitations of previous MCG approaches. The nuclear overlap function, number of participant nucleons and binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, participant eccentricity and triangularity, overlap area and average path length are presented in intervals of percentile centrality for lead-lead (PbPb) and proton-lead (pPb) collisions at all collision energies. We demonstrate for collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$ TeV that the central values of the Glauber quantities change by up to 7%, in a few bins of reaction centrality, due to the improvements implemented, though typically remain within the previously assigned systematic uncertainties, while their associated uncertainties are generally smaller (mostly below 5%) at all centralities than for earlier calculations. Tables for all quantities versus centrality at present and foreseen collision energies involving Pb nuclei, as well as for collisions of XeXe at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.44$, and AuAu and CuCu at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=0.2$ TeV, are provided.

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arXiv2018

Effects of Longitudinal Asymmetry in Heavy-Ion Collisions

In collisions of identical nuclei at a given impact parameter, the number of nucleons participating in the overlap region of each nucleus can be unequal due to nuclear density fluctuations. The asymmetry due to the unequal number of participating nucleons, referred to as longitudinal asymmetry, causes a shift in the center of mass rapidity of the participant zone. The information of the event asymmetry allows us to isolate and study the effect of longitudinal asymmetry on rapidity distribution of final state particles. In a Monte Carlo Glauber model the average rapidity-shift is found to be almost linearly related to the asymmetry. Using toy models, as well as Monte Carlo data for Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV generated with HIJING, two different versions of AMPT and DPMJET models, we demonstrate that the effect of asymmetry on final state rapidity distribution can be quantitatively related to the average rapidity shift via a third-order polynomial with a dominantly linear term. The coefficients of the polynomial are proportional to the rapidity shift with the dependence being sensitive to the details of the rapidity distribution.Experimental estimates of the spectator asymmetry through the measurement of spectator nucleons in a Zero Degree Calorimeter may hence be used to further constrain the initial conditions in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

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arXiv2017

Glauber modeling of high-energy nuclear collisions at sub-nucleon level

Glauber models based on nucleon--nucleon interactions are commonly used to characterize the initial state in high-energy nuclear collisions, and the dependence of its properties on impact parameter or number of participating nucleons. In this paper, an extension to the Glauber model is presented, which accounts for an arbitrary number of effective sub-nucleon degrees of freedom, or active constituents, in the nucleons. Properties of the initial state, such as the number of constituent participants and collisions, as well as eccentricity and triangularity, are calculated and systematically compared for different assumptions of how to distribute the sub-nuclear degrees of freedom and for various collision systems. It is demonstrated that at high collision energy the number of produced particles scales with an average number of sub-nucleon degrees of freedom of between $3$ and $5$. The source codes for the constituent Monte Carlo Glauber extension, as well as for the calculation of the overlap area and participant density in a standard Glauber model, are made publicly available.

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arXiv2016

Experimental overview on small collision systems at the LHC

These conferences proceedings summarize the experimental findings obtained in small collision systems at the LHC, as presented in the special session on "QGP in small systems?" at the Quark Matter 2015 conference. (The arXiv version is significantly longer than the printed proceedings, with more details and a short discussion.)

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arXiv2016

Correction methods for finite-acceptance effects in two-particle correlation analyses

Two-particle angular correlations have been widely used as a tool to explore particle production mechanisms in heavy-ion collisions. The mixed-event technique is generally used as a standard method to correct for finite-acceptance effects. We demonstrate that event mixing only provides an approximate acceptance correction, and propose new methods for finite-acceptance corrections. Starting from discussions about 2-dimensional correction procedures, new methods are derived for specific assumptions on the properties of the signal, such as uniform signal distribution or $δ$-function-like trigger particle distribution, and suitable for two-particle correlation analyses from particles at mid-rapidity and jet-hadron or high $p_{\text{T}}$-triggered hadron-hadron correlations. Per-trigger associated particle yields from the mixed-event method and the new methods are compared through Monte Carlo simulations containing well-defined correlation signals. Significant differences are observed at large pseudorapidity differences in general and especially for asymmetric particle distribution like that produced in proton--nucleus collisions. The applicability and validity of the new methods are discussed in detail.

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