Particle Multiplicities in Lead-Lead Collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider from Nonlinear Evolution with Running Coupling Corrections

We present predictions for the pseudorapidity density of charged particles produced in central Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC. Particle production in such collisions is calculated in the framework of kₜ factorization. The nuclear unintegrated gluon distributions at LHC energies are determined from numerical solutions of the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation including recently calculated running coupling corrections. The initial conditions for the evolution are fixed by fitting Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider data at collision energies √sNN=130 and 200 GeV per nucleon. We obtain $d{N}ch^{Pb{{{-}}}Pb}/d{η}(√{{s}NN}=5.5 TeV){|}_{{η}=0}{≈}1290--1480$.