Comparative study of charged multiplicities and moments in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=7 TeV in the forward region at the LHC

Abstract: Charged particle multiplicities in proton-proton collisions measured in the LHCb detector at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt s$=7 TeV in different windows of pseudorapidity $\eta$, in the forward region of the vertex detector are studied by using different statistical distributions. Three distributions are compared with the data and the moments of the distributions are calculated. The data constituting two sets, one of minimum bias events and another of hard QCD events are analysed. The distributions considered derive from different functional forms based on underlying interaction dynamics. The analysis complements the multiplicity analysis done by LHCb in terms of Monte Carlo event generators. The present analysis is from a different perspective, using statistical distributions.