On the non-universality of heavy quark hadronization in elementary high-energy collisions

It has been traditionally hypothesized that the heavy quark (charm, $c$ and bottom, $b$) fragmentation is universal across different collision systems, based on the notion that hadronization as a soft process should occur at the characteristic non-perturbative QCD scale, $\Lambda_{QCD}$. However, this universality hypothesis has recently been challenged by the observation that the $c$- and $b$-baryon production relative to their meson counterparts in minimum bias proton-proton ($pp$) collisions at the LHC energies is significantly enhanced as compared to the electron-positron ($e^+e^-$) collisions. The conception of non-universality is unambiguously reinforced by the latest measurement of the charged-particle multiplicity dependence of the $b$-baryon-to-meson yield ratio, $\Lambda_b/B$, by the LHCb experiment in $\sqrt{s}=13$\,TeV $pp$ collisions at the LHC, evolving continuously from the saturation value in minimum bias $pp$ collisions toward the small value in $e^+e^-$ collisions as the system size gradually reduces. We address the multiplicity dependence of $b$-baryon production in the canonical statistical hadronization model with input $b$-hadron spectrum augmented with many hitherto unobserved states from quark model predictions. We demonstrate that the decreasing trend of the $\Lambda_b/B$ toward low multiplicities can be quantitatively understood from the canonical suppression on the yield of $\Lambda_b$, as caused by the requirement of strict conservation of baryon number in sufficiently small systems. We have therefore proposed a plausible scenario for understanding the origin of the non-universality of heavy quark fragmentation in elementary collisions.