Study of K*(892)0 and φ (1020) meson production in proton-proton and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}$=2.76 TeV

In this paper, we describe a study of charged particle yield as a function of p_T for K^*(892)⁰ and φ (1020) mesons in proton-proton (pp) and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}$=2.76 TeV in the central rapidity region of ∣y∣<0.5, in a p_T range of 0<p_T <15 GeV c⁻¹ in pp collisions and in a p_T range of 0<p_T<20 GeV c⁻¹ in Pb-Pb collisions. We also investigated a very important ratio, the nuclear modification factor, to study the effects of the medium in the most central region, i.e. 0%-5% centrality. For data simulation, we used the EPOS-LHC and EPOS-1.99 models. To check the validity of these models’ simulations, we compared the data obtained from these Monte Carlo simulation programs with ALICE experimental data for $\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}$=2.76 TeV. It was concluded that the models’ predictions for the φ-meson in pp and for the most central Pb-Pb collisions disagreed with the ALICE data, and that the difference increased with p_T. This may be connected with the essential role of collective parton behaviors which could not have been taken into account by the models. For K^*0 mesons, both programs gave almost the same predictions, and with p_T in the interval p_T>3 GeV c⁻¹, the predictions were very close to the experimental data. Both models gave higher predictions for the soft p_T interval and lower predictions for the hard interactions. The values of the R_AA distributions were lower than unity and both models were very close to the ALICE data. It is very interesting that the models were not able to describe the p_T distributions, but they gave good predictions for their ratios. This may possibly be due to parton collective behaviors. We observed some additional suppression of K^*0 at low values of p_T with respect to φ-mesons, which may be related to the role of the masses of the particles in soft interactions. The rising trend for R_AA in the region from p_T =10 GeV c⁻¹ to 20 GeV c⁻¹ observed by the ALICE experiment was absent for the φ-mesons.