PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea Amoros, G Cabrera Urban, S Castillo Gimenez, V Costa, MJ Escobar, C Ferrer, A Fiorini, L Fuster, J Garcia, C Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Hernandez Jimenez, Y Higon-Rodriguez, E Irles Quiles, A Kaci, M Lacasta, C Lacuesta, VR Marti-Garcia, S Miñano, M Mitsou, VA Moles-Valls, R Moreno Llacer, M Oliver Garcia, E Perez Garcia-Estañ, MT Ros, E Salt, J Solans, CA Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Torro Pastor, E Valladolid Gallego, E Valls Ferrer, JA Villaplana Perez, M Vos, M Wildauer, A TI Measurement of the centrality dependence of the charged particle pseudorapidity distribution in lead-lead collisions at root s(NN)=2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector SO Physics Letters B JI Phys. Lett. B PY 2012 BP 363 EP 382 VL 710 IS 3 DI 10.1016/j.physletb.2012.02.045 LA English AB The ATLAS experiment at the LHC has measured the centrality dependence of charged particle pseudorapidity distributions over vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2 in lead-lead collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV. In order to include particles with transverse momentum as low as 30 MeV, the data were recorded with the central solenoid magnet off. Charged particles were reconstructed with two algorithms (2-point "tracklets" and full tracks) using information from the pixel detector only. The lead-lead collision centrality was characterized by the total transverse energy in the forward calorimeter in the range 3.2 < vertical bar eta vertical bar< 4.9. Measurements are presented of the per-event charged particle pseudorapidity distribution, dN(ch)/d eta, and the average charged particle multiplicity in the pseudorapidity interval vertical bar eta vertical bar < 0.5 in several intervals of collision centrality. The results are compared to previous mid-rapidity measurements at the LHC and RHIC. The variation of the mid-rapidity charged particle yield per colliding nucleon pair with the number of participants is consistent with lower root s(NN) results. The shape of the dN(ch)/d eta distribution is found to be independent of centrality within the systematic uncertainties of the measurement. ER