Investigating high energy proton proton collisions with a multi-phase transport model approach based on PYTHIA8 initial conditions

The striking resemblance of high multiplicity proton-proton (pp) collisions at the LHC to heavy ion collisions challenges our conventional wisdom on the formation of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). A consistent explanation of the collectivity phenomena in pp will help us to understand the mechanism that leads to the QGP-like signals in small systems. In this study, we introduce a transport model approach connecting the initial conditions provided by PYTHIA8 with subsequent AMPT rescatterings to study the collective behavior in high energy pp collisions. The multiplicity dependence of light hadron productions from this model is in reasonable agreement with the pp $$\sqrt{s}=13$$ TeV experimental data. It is found in the comparisons that both the partonic and hadronic final state interactions are important for the generation of the radial flow feature of the pp transverse momentum spectra. The study also shows that the long range two particle azimuthal correlation in high multiplicity pp events is sensitive to the proton sub-nucleon spatial fluctuations.