Speaker
Description
The enhanced production of strange hadrons in heavy-ion collisions relative to that in pp collisions was historically considered as one of the signatures of the formation of a deconfined quark-gluon plasma. At the LHC, recent measurements in pp and p-Pb collisions showed that the production of strange hadrons relative to pions increases with the charged particle multiplicity in the event, a feature that is reminiscent of the heavy-ion phenomenology but that still remains to be understood.
The particle multiplicity is an important characteristic of the hadronic final state of a proton-proton interaction, but it also reflects the initial dynamics of the collision, being strongly correlated with the energy effectively available for particle production in its initial stages (effective energy). In pp collisions the effective energy is reduced with respect to the full center of mass energy due to leading baryon emission at forward rapidities.
In this contribution, we will present results on the production of $\Lambda$, $\Xi$, and $\Omega$ baryons as a function of the charged particle multiplicity measured at midrapidity and of the forward energy detected by ALICE Zero Degree Calorimeters.
The results provide new insights on the role of initial state effects on strangeness production.
