Anti-baryon production in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We consider baryon and antibaryon production in heavy-ion collisions in the context of the Skyrme model of nucleons as topological solitons. In this model the abundances of baryons and antibaryons are not controlled by thermodynamic Boltzmann factors, but by the sizes of coherence domains for the low-temperature quark condensate. Strong violations of naive chemical equilibrium by the formation process are thus possible. The B B production rate is bounded from above by energy and entropy conservation, but may be much larger than the naive Boltzmann expectation. The maximal production rate corresponds to a physically plausible domain size for the chiral domains. We stress the importance of measuring B production in heavy-ion collisions as a probe of nonperturbative QCD.