Clocking the particle production and tracking of strangeness balance and radial flow effects at top LHC energy with ALICE

TL;DR

This paper uses balance functions measured in high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC to study the timing of quark production, strangeness balance, and radial flow effects, comparing results with models and other collision systems.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of charge and strangeness balance functions in pp collisions at 13.6 TeV, enabling insights into particle production timing and system expansion.

Findings

Balance functions vary with multiplicity and energy.

Results support models of sequential quark production.

Comparison with other systems reveals collision energy dependence.

Abstract

Balance functions have been used extensively to elucidate the time evolution of quark production in heavy-ion collisions. Early models predicted two stages of quark production, one for light quarks and one for the heavier strange quark, separated by a period of isentropic expansion. This led to the notion of clocking particle production and tracking radial flow effects, which drive the expansion of the system. In this talk, balance functions of identified particles in different multiplicity classes of pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6\;\text{TeV}$ recorded by ALICE during the LHC Run 3 are reported. The results are compared with different models as well as with previously published results on pp and Pb--Pb collisions at different energies. The results enable tracking the balancing of electric charge and strangeness by measuring how the widths and integrals of the charge and strangeness balance functions evolve across different collision energies.