Anomalous kaon correlations measured in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC as evidence for the melting and refreezing of the QCD vacuum

¹ School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
² Department of Physics and Astronomy and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA

^* e-mail: kapusta@umn.edu
^** e-mail: prattsc@msu.edu
^*** e-mail: mayank.singh@vanderbilt.edu

Published online: 26 June 2024

Abstract

Measurements of the dynamical correlations between neutral and charged kaons in central Pb-Pb collisions at √S_NN = 2.76 TeV by the ALICE Collaboration display anomalous behavior relative to conventional heavy-ion collision simulators. We consider other conventional statistical models, none of which can reproduce the magnitude and centrality dependence of the correlations. The data can be reproduced by coherent emission from domains which grow in number and volume with increasing centrality. We study the dynamical evolution of the strange quark condensate and show that the energy released during the expansion and cooling of the system may be sufficient to explain the anomaly.