We propose a simple model of production of strange baryons and antibaryons in nuclear collisions at the CERN SPS. The model takes into account both the increase of strangeness production in collisions of lighter ions and a possibility of the formation of anomalous, strangeness rich matter in central PbPb interactions. It is shown that ratios like $<Omega>:<Xi>:<Lambda>$ depend strongly on the presence of anomalous matter and can be used to determine its phenomenological parameters. In the model we assume that particle composition of final state hadrons is essentially given by a rapid recombination of quarks and antiquarks formed in tube-on-tube interactions of incoming nucleons.
We introduce additional coalescence factors for the production of strange baryons in a multiphase transport (AMPT) model in order to describe the enhanced production of multistrange hadrons observed in Pb-Pb collisions at $rm sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV at the Large hadron Collider (LHC) and Au+Au collisions at $rm sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).This extended AMPT model is found to also give a reasonable description of the multiplicity dependence of the strangeness enhancement observed in high multiplicity events in $pp$ collisions at $rm sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV and $p$-Pb collisions at $rm sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV. We find that the coalescence factors depend on the system size but not much on whether the system is produced from A+A or p+A collisions. The extended AMPT model thus provides a convenient way to model the mechanism underlying the observed strangeness enhancement in collisions of both small and large systems at RHIC and LHC energies.
It was recently found that in sulphur-induced nuclear collisions at 200 A GeV the observed strange hadron abundances can be explained within a thermodynamic model where baryons and mesons separately are in a state of relative chemical equilibrium, with overall strangeness being slightly undersaturated, but distributed among the strange hadron channels according to relative chemical equilibrium with a vanishing strange quark chemical potential. We develop a consistent thermodynamic formulation of the concept of relative chemical equilibrium and show how to introduce into the partition function deviations from absolute chemical equilibrium, e.~g.~an undersaturation of overall strangeness or the breaking of chemical equilibrium between mesons and baryons. We then proceed to test on the available data the hypothesis that the strange quark chemical potential vanishes everywhere, and that the rapidity distributions of all the observed hadrons can be explained in terms of one common, rapidity-dependent function $mu_{rm q}(eta)$ for the baryon chemical potential only. The aim of this study is to shed light on the observed strong rapidity dependence of the strange baryon ratios in the NA36 experiment.
The charge radii and quadrupole moments of baryons with nonzero strangeness are calculated using a parametrization method based on the symmetries of the strong interaction.
The thermal multihadron production observed in different high energy collisions poses two basic problems: (1) why do even elementary collisions with comparatively few secondaries (e+e- annihilation) show thermal behaviour, and 2) why is there in such interactions a suppression of strange particle production? We show that the recently proposed mechanism of thermal hadron production through Hawking-Unruh radiation can naturally account for both. The event horizon of colour confinement leads to thermal behaviour, but the resulting temperature depends on the strange quark content of the produced hadrons, causing a deviation from full equilibrium and hence a suppression of strange particle production. We apply the resulting formalism to multihadron production in e+e- annihilation over a wide energy range and make a comprehensive analysis of the data in the conventional statistical hadronization model and the modified Hawking-Unruh formulation. We show that this formulation provides a very good description of the measured hadronic abundances, fully determined in terms of the string tension and the bare strange quark mass; it contains no adjustable parameters.
The production of charmed and beauty baryons in proton-proton collisions at high energies is analyzed within the modified quark-gluon string model. We present some predictions for the experiments on the forward beauty baryon production in pp collisions at LHC energies. This analysis allows us to find useful information on the Regge trajectories of the heavy (b barb) mesons and the sea beauty quark distributions in the proton.