Speaker
Description
The ALICE group at Lund studies collisions of protons and heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider to explore the behavior of nuclear matter under extreme conditions. These studies aim to understand how quarks and gluons interact and form the particles we observe.
Measurements of strange hadrons in small collision systems have revealed unexpected features, such as enhanced strangeness production and collective-like behavior at high multiplicity. These observations challenge the traditional view that thermal equilibration and quark–gluon plasma formation occur only in large systems. Current QCD-inspired models reproduce the general trends but struggle to describe the observed yields and spectra quantitatively, indicating that the microscopic mechanisms of strangeness production and hadronisation are not yet fully understood.
I will present ongoing analyses of strange hadron production (K, Λ, Ξ) in proton–proton and ultra-peripheral Pb–Pb collisions. The results probe the system-size dependence of strangeness production and provide constraints on modern hadronisation models.
References
- ALICE Collaboration, S. Acharya et al., Phys. Rev. C 99(2), 024906 (2019).
- ALICE Collaboration, S. Acharya et al., Eur. Phys. J. C 80, 1–26 (2020).
- ALICE Collaboration, J. Adam et al., Nat. Phys. 13, 535–539 (2017).
- K. Werner, Phys. Rev. C 109(1), 014910 (2024).
