Strangeness enhancement across collision systems without a plasma

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel rope hadronization model applied to different collision systems at LHC energies, showing that strangeness and baryon enhancement correlate with charged multiplicity, aligning qualitatively with experimental data.

Contribution

It presents a new application of the rope hadronization model within PYTHIA/Angantyr to explain strangeness enhancement across various collision systems without invoking a quark-gluon plasma.

Findings

Strangeness and baryon enhancement increase with charged multiplicity.

The model qualitatively agrees with LHC data across systems.

Baryonic yields in AA collisions overshoot at high multiplicities.

Abstract

We present novel rope hadronization results for strange hadron enhancement in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions using PYTHIA/Angantyr at LHC energies. With the rope model for string fragmentation, we find that the strangeness and baryon enhancement has a coherent increase across all collision systems as a function of average charged central multiplicity, in qualitative agreement with LHC data. In AA collisions, we find that the baryonic yields overshoot data at high multiplicities, and we discuss how a combination of rope hadronization with other string interactions may tame this rise.