Do image Collisions Flow at RHIC? Understanding One-Particle Distributions, Multiplicity Evolution, and Conservation Laws Original Research Article

Collective, explosive flow in central heavy ion collisions manifests itself in the mass dependence of pT distributions and femtoscopic length scales, measured in the soft sector (pT≲1GeV/c). Measured pT distributions from proton-proton collisions differ significantly from those from heavy ion collisions. This has been taken as evidence that p+p collisions generate little collective flow, a conclusion in line with naive expectations. We point out possible hazards of ignoring phase-space restrictions due to conservation laws when comparing high- and low-multiplicity final states. Already in two-particle correlation functions, we see clear signals of such phase-space restrictions in low-multiplicity collisions at RHIC. We discuss how these same effects, then, must appear in the single particle spectra. We argue that the effects of energy and momentum conservation actually dominate the observed systematics, and that p+p collisions may be much more similar to heavy ion collisions than generally thought.