Isospin and isospin/strangeness correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Abstract

A fundamental symmetry of nuclear and particle physics is isospin whose third component is the Gell-Mann/Nishijima expression I(z)=Q-(B+S)/2 . The role of isospin symmetry in relativistic heavy ion collisions is studied. An isospin I(z), strangeness S correlation is shown to be a direct and simple measure of flavor correlations, vanishing in a Qg phase of uncorrelated flavors in both symmetric N=Z and asymmetric N not equal to Z systems. By contrast, in a hadron phase, a I(z)/S correlation exists as long as the electrostatic charge chemical potential mu(Q)does not equal 0 as in N not equal to Z asymmetric systems. A parallel is drawn with a Zeeman effect which breaks a spin degeneracy