Baryon and antibaryon production in hadronic and nuclear interactions

Abstract

We introduce a new formulation of the diquark breaking mechanism which describes with no free parameters the huge nuclear stopping observed in central nucleus-nucleus collisions. Supplemented, in the dual parton model, with strings originating from diquark–antidiquark pairs from the nucleon sea, it gives a substantial increase of hyperon and antihyperon yields from pPb to central PbPb collisions. Compared to data, this increase is slightly underestimated for Λ's and Ξ's but is five times too small for Ω's. Introducing final state interactions, a reasonable description of all baryon and antibaryon yields is achieved.