Transport dynamics of parton interactions in pp collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
We investigate the transport dynamics of partons in proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using a Boltzmann transport approach, the Parton Cascade Model (PCM). The calculations include semihard perturbative quantum chromodynamics interaction of partons populating the nucleons and provide a space-time description of the collision in terms of cascading partons undergoing scatterings and fragmentations. Parton production and number of collisions rise rapidly with an increase in the center of mass energy of the collision. For a given center of mass energy, the number of parton interactions is seen to rise stronger than linear with decreasing impact parameter before saturating for very central collisions. The strangeness enhancement factor γs for the semihard processes is found to rise rapidly and saturate towards the highest collision energies. Overall, our study indicates a significant amount of partonic interactions in proton-proton collisions, which supports the observation of fluid-like behavior for high multiplicity proton-proton collisions observed in the experiments.