The Thermal Production of Strange and Non-Strange Hadrons in e+e- Collisions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Hawking-Unruh radiation from the event horizon of color confinement explains thermal behavior and strange particle suppression in e+e- collisions, fitting experimental data without adjustable parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a Hawking-Unruh radiation model for hadron production that accounts for thermal features and strangeness suppression in e+e- collisions, with no free parameters.

Findings

The model accurately describes hadron abundances across energies.

It explains strangeness suppression via temperature dependence on quark content.

The formalism depends only on string tension and strange quark mass.

Abstract

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.