Isospin and isospin/strangeness correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how isospin and strangeness correlations serve as indicators of flavor correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions, distinguishing between different phases of matter based on these symmetries.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to measure flavor correlations through isospin/strangeness correlations, highlighting their behavior in different phases of nuclear matter.

Findings

Isospin/strangeness correlation vanishes in a quark-gluon phase with uncorrelated flavors.

A non-zero I(z)/S correlation indicates a hadron phase when mu(Q) ≠ 0.

The study draws an analogy between isospin symmetry breaking and the Zeeman effect.

Abstract

A fundamental symmetry of nuclear and particle physics is isospin whose third component is the Gell-Mann/Nishijima expression I(z)=Q-(B+S)/2 . The role of isospin symmetry in relativistic heavy ion collisions is studied. An isospin I(z), strangeness S correlation is shown to be a direct and simple measure of flavor correlations, vanishing in a Qg phase of uncorrelated flavors in both symmetric N=Z and asymmetric N not equal to Z systems. By contrast, in a hadron phase, a I(z)/S correlation exists as long as the electrostatic charge chemical potential mu(Q)does not equal 0 as in N not equal to Z asymmetric systems. A parallel is drawn with a Zeeman effect which breaks a spin degeneracy