Study of the Production of Strange Particles in Proton–Proton Collisions at √s = 0.9 TeV

Abstract

The differential yield of strange mesons $$ (K_{s}^{0} ,\phi ) $$ and singly and doubly strange baryons (Λ, $$ \bar{\varLambda } $$ and Ξ) in pp collision at 0.9 TeV in the transverse momentum (pT) ranging from 0.1 to 3.5 GeV/c and in the rapidity region of |y| <0.75 is reported. The spectra obtained by Monte Carlo simulations with event generators: EPOS 1.99, EPOS-LHC, HIJING 1.38, QGSJETII-04 and Sibyll2.3c, are compared with the ALICE measurements. For $$ K_{s}^{0} $$, EPOS-LHC, Sibyll2.3c and QGSJETII-04 models’ predictions are closer to the experimental data at low pT. For Λ and $$ \bar{\varLambda } $$, EPOS 1.99 and QGSJETII-04 predict in some of the pT regions, while only EPOS 1.99 model predicts well the Ξ spectra. QGSJETII-04 and Sibyll2.3c predict well the distribution of $$ \phi $$ mesons at high pT. For Λ/$$ K_{s}^{0} $$, only QGSJETII-04 predicts the ratio very well. Although the models are qualitatively compatible with the data, none of them predict all the distributions over the entire pT range.