Tsallis Fits to pT Spectra and Multiple Hard Scattering in pp Collisions at the LHC

Phenomenological Tsallis fits to the CMS, ATLAS, and ALICE transverse momentum spectra of hadrons for pp collisions at LHC were recently found to extend over a large range of the transverse momentum. We investigate whether the few degrees of freedom in the Tsallis parametrization may arise from the relativistic parton-parton hard-scattering and related processes. The effects of the multiple hard-scattering and parton showering processes on the power law are discussed. We find empirically that whereas the transverse spectra of both hadrons and jets exhibit power-law behavior of 1/pT^n at high pT, the power indices n for hadrons are systematically greater than those for jets, for which n~4-5.