Hawking-Unruh hadronization and strangeness production in high energy collisions

Abstract

The interpretation of quark ($q$)- antiquark ($\bar q$) pairs production and the sequential string breaking as tunneling through the event horizon of colour confinement leads to a thermal hadronic spectrum with a universal Unruh temperature, $T \simeq 165$ Mev,related to the quark acceleration, $a$, by $T=a/2\pi$. The resulting temperature depends on the quark mass and then on the content of the produced hadrons, causing a deviation from full equilibrium and hence a suppression of strange particle production in elementary collisions. In nucleus-nucleus collisions, where the quark density is much bigger, one has to introduce an average temperature (acceleration) which dilutes the quark mass effect and the strangeness suppression almost disappears.