Chemical Equilibrium in Collisions of Small Systems
Abstract
The system-size dependence of particle production in heavy-ion collisions at the top SPS energy is analyzed in terms of the statistical model. A systematic comparison is made of two suppression mechanisms that quantify strange particle yields in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions: the canonical model with strangeness correlation radius determined from the data and the model formulated in the canonical ensemble using chemical off-equilibrium strangeness suppression factor. The system-size dependence of the correlation radius and the thermal parameters are obtained for p-p, C-C, Si-Si and Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 17.3 AGeV. It is shown that on the basis of a consistent set of data there is no clear difference between the two suppression patterns. In the present study the strangeness correlation radius was found to exhibit a rather weak dependence on the system size.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0707.3879,
title = {Chemical Equilibrium in Collisions of Small Systems},
author = {I. Kraus and J. Cleymans and H. Oeschler and K. Redlich and S. Wheaton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.3879},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Physical Review C