In Search of Deconfined Quarks - with the ALICE experiment at the LHC

The goal of the project is to study extremely hot and dense QCD matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), created in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in particular for the production of strange quarks (strangeness).

We aim to confront the hypothesis that strangeness is mainly produced at the time the hadrons are formed, as in the Lund string model, with the hypothesis that strange quarks are deconfined before they hadronize, as in the QGP - by measuring the momentum-space correlation between multi-strange baryons and other hadrons.

We will study if the correlations are close in momentum-space (confined) or smeared out (deconfined), and by varying the charged-particle multiplicity see if the production mechanism of multi-strange baryons is Universal or if it changes with system size as suggested by the recent ALICE Nature Physics publication.The data will be provided by the ALICE experiment at CERN LHC.

The number of multi-strange baryons that can be recorded in Run3 (2021-2024) is expected to be up to a factor 100 larger than in the previous two runs due to the upgrades of, e.g. the Time Projection Chamber´s rate capabilities during the current Long Shutdown 2 (2019-2020); an upgrade where the PI has played a leading role.Preliminary results by the PI´s current final-year Ph.D. student has demonstrated the feasibility of a high precision measurement.

This application requests funding to extend the studies to more particle combinations and collision systems.