Single-inclusive production of large-p T charged particles in hadronic collisions at TeV energies and perturbative QCD predictions

The single inclusive spectrum of charged particles with transverse momenta p T = 3 – 150 GeV/c measured at midrapidity by the CDF experiment in proton-antiproton ( p - p̄ ) collisions at √s = 1.96 TeV is compared to next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD calculations using the most recent parametrizations of the parton distributions and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions. Above p T ≈ 20 GeV/c, there is a very sizeable disagreement of the Tevatron data compared to the NLO predictions and to x T -scaling expectations, suggesting a problem in the experimental data. We also present the predictions for the p T -differential charged hadron spectra and the associated theoretical uncertainties for proton-proton (p-p) collisions at LHC energies ( √s = 0.9 - 14 TeV ) . Two procedures to estimate the charged hadron spectra at LHC heavy-ion collision energies (√s = 2.76 ) , 5.5 TeV) from p-p measurements are suggested.