Anomalous baryon production in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the unexpected baryon production in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies, proposing a new mechanism involving gluon field-induced pair production to explain experimental anomalies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel channel of quark-antiquark and diquark-antidiquark pair production via the Schwinger mechanism, enhancing understanding of baryon yields.

Findings

The proposed mechanism explains the anomalous baryon production observed.

The model aligns well with experimental data on baryon-meson ratios.

It suggests early-stage gluon fields significantly influence particle yields.

Abstract

In ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions the baryon-meson ratio is not fully understood in the intermediate-to-high transverse momentum region. Although quark coalescence methods combined with jet fragmentation yield results close to the experimental data, some tendencies are not reproduced and require further investigation. We propose a new channel, namely extra quark-antiquark and diquark-antidiquark pair production from coherent gluon field created in the early stage of heavy ion collisions. This process is described quantitatively by the time-dependent Schwinger-mechanism. The extra diquark-quark coalescence yields are able to explain the measured anomalous baryon production.