Baryon and Antibaryon Production in Hadronic and Nuclear Interactions

TL;DR

This paper presents a new diquark breaking model that accurately describes nuclear stopping and hyperon production in high-energy nucleus collisions, enhanced by final state interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a parameter-free diquark breaking mechanism within the dual parton model, improving predictions of baryon and antibaryon yields in nuclear collisions.

Findings

The model reproduces nuclear stopping observed in experiments.

It predicts increased hyperon and antihyperon yields from pPb to PbPb collisions.

Final state interactions improve agreement with experimental data.

Abstract

We introduce a new formulation of the diquark breaking mechanism which describes with no free parameters the huge nuclear stopping observed in central nucleus-nucleus collisions. Supplemented, in the dual parton model, with strings originating from diquark--antidiquark pairs from the nucleon sea, it gives a substantial increase of hyperon and antihyperon yields from $pPb$ to central $PbPb$ collisions. Compared to data, this increase is slightly underestimated for $\Lambda$'s and $\Xi$'s but is five times too small for $\Omega$'s. Introducing final state interactions, a reasonable description of all baryon and antibaryon yields is achieved.