EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL C, vol.72, no.3, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
The transverse momentum spectra of charged particles have been measured in pp and PbPb collisions at root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV by the CMS experiment at the LHC. In the transverse momentum range p(T) = 5-10 GeV/c, the charged particle yield in the most central PbPb collisions is suppressed by up to a factor of 7 compared to the pp yield scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions. At higher p(T), this suppression is significantly reduced, approaching roughly a factor of 2 for particles with p(T) in the range p(T) = 40-100 GeV/c.