Results on cascade production in lead-lead interactions from the NA57 experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports on the production of cascade particles in lead-lead collisions at CERN SPS, extending previous measurements to analyze strangeness enhancement patterns across different energies and collision centralities.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of cascade production in Pb-Pb collisions at 160 GeV/c, expanding the understanding of strangeness enhancement in heavy-ion interactions.

Findings

Observed cascade production in central Pb-Pb collisions

Extended strangeness enhancement analysis to wider centrality range

Compared results with previous experiments and models

Abstract

The NA57 experiment has been designed to study the production of strange and multi-strange particles in Pb-Pb and p-Be collisions at the CERN SPS. The predecessor experiment WA97 has measured an enhanced abundance of strange particles in Pb-Pb collisions relative to p-A reactions at 160 GeV/c per nucleon beam momentum. NA57 has extended the WA97 measurements to investigate the evolution of the strangeness enhancement pattern as a function of the beam energy and over a wider centrality range. In this paper, we report results on cascade production for about the 60% most central collisions at 160 GeV/c per nucleon.