Antimatter production in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies

One of the striking features of particle production at high beam energies is the near equal abundance of matter and antimatter in the central rapidity region. In this paper we study how this symmetry is reached as the beam energy is increased. In particular, we quantify explicitly the energy dependence of the approach to matter/antimatter symmetry in proton-proton and in heavy-ion collisions. Expectations are presented also for the production of more complex forms of antimatter like antihypernuclei.

Strange Particle Production in pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 7 TeV measured with the ALICE Experiment

Hadrons measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 7 TeV with the ALICE detector have been identified using various techniques: the specific energy loss and the time-of flight information for charged pions, kaons and protons, the displaced vertex resulting from their weak decay for K0, Lambda and Xi and the kink topology of decaying charged kaons. These various particle identification tools give the best separation at different momentum ranges and the results are combined to obtain spectra from pt = 100 MeV/c to 2.5 GeV/c. This allows to extract total yields. In detail we discuss the K/pi ratio together with previous measurements and we show a fit using a statistical approach.