Strangeness production across collision system size and energy at the LHC

Abstract: At extreme energy densities and temperatures, strongly interacting matter is expected to undergo a transition into the quark–gluon plasma, a state in which quarks and gluons are no longer confined inside hadrons. Strangeness enhancement was originally proposed as a characteristic signature of this state in heavy-ion collisions. However, the ALICE observation of enhanced strange and multi-strange hadron production in high-multiplicity pp collisions challenged the traditional separation between small and large collision systems and raised a central question: is strangeness production controlled primarily by the size and energy of the colliding system, or by the final-state charged-particle multiplicity?

In this seminar, I will review strangeness production from small to large collision systems at the LHC, with emphasis on the results of my PhD analysis of the full ALICE Run 2 Pb–Pb dataset at sNN=5.02 TeV. This analysis measures the centrality dependence of KS0, Λ+Λˉ, Ξ−+Ξˉ+ and Ω−+Ωˉ+ production, including pT-differential spectra, integrated yields, mean transverse momenta and baryon-to-meson ratios. The results provide a high-precision heavy-ion benchmark for the multiplicity evolution of strangeness production and show how the enhancement observed in pp and p–Pb collisions evolves smoothly into the Pb–Pb regime, where it saturates at high multiplicity.

I will discuss these measurements in the broader context of statistical hadronisation, canonical suppression, collective expansion, colour reconnection, rope hadronisation and core–corona descriptions. Following recent developments in the field, I will also highlight why inclusive multiplicity alone is not sufficient to identify the underlying mechanism, and how multidifferential observables involving jets and effective energy can help disentangle final-state multiplicity effects from the initial-state conditions.

general relativity and quantum cosmologyHEP - experimentHEP - latticeHEP - phenomenologyHEP - theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

NKUA HEP Seminars

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