Hawking-Unruh Hadronization and Strangeness Production in High Energy Collisions

TL;DR

This paper proposes that thermal hadron production in high energy collisions can be explained by Hawking-Unruh radiation, accounting for strangeness suppression in elementary collisions and its reduction in heavy ion collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism linking Hawking-Unruh radiation to hadronization, providing a unified explanation for thermal behavior and strangeness suppression phenomena.

Findings

Universal temperature of about 170 MeV for hadron production.

Strangeness suppression arises from quark mass dependence in the Hawking-Unruh mechanism.

Suppression diminishes in heavy ion collisions due to higher quark density.

Abstract

The thermal multihadron production observed in different high energy collisions poses many basic problems: why do even elementary, $e^+e^-$ and hadron-hadron, collisions show thermal behaviour? Why is there in such interactions a suppression of strange particle production? Why does the strangeness suppression almost disappear in relativistic heavy ion collisions? Why in these collisions is the thermalization time less than $\simeq 0.5$ fm/c? We show that the recently proposed mechanism of thermal hadron production through Hawking-Unruh radiation can naturally answer the previous questions. Indeed, the interpretation of quark- antiquark pairs production, by the sequential string breaking, as tunneling through the event horizon of colour confinement leads to thermal behavior with a universal temperature, $T \simeq 170$ Mev,related to the quark acceleration, a, by $T=a/2\pi$. The resulting temperature depends on the quark mass and then on the content of the produced hadrons, causing a deviation from full equilibrium and hence a suppression of strange particle production in elementary collisions. In nucleus-nucleus collisions, where the quark density is much bigger, one has to introduce an average temperature (acceleration) which dilutes the quark mass effect and the strangeness suppression almost disappears.