Antihyperon-Production in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collision

Abstract

Recently it has been shown that the observed antiproton yield in heavy-ion collisions at CERN-SpS energies can be understood by multi-pionic interactions which enforce local chemical equilibrium of the antiprotons with the nucleons and pions. Here we show that antihyperons are driven towards local chemical equilibrium with pions, nucleons and kaons on a timescale of less than 3 fm/c when applying a similar argument for the antihyperons by considering the inverse channel of annihilation reactions anti-Y + p to pions + kaons. These multi-mesonic reactions easily explain the antihyperon yields at CERN-SpS energies as advertised in pure thermal, hadronic models without the need of a quark gluon plasma phase. In addition, the argument also applies for AGS energies.