Strangeness neutrality and the QCD phase diagram

Understand

Since the incident nuclei in heavy-ion collisions do not carry strangeness, the global net strangeness of the detected hadrons has to vanish.

• We show that there is an intimate relation between strangeness neutrality and baryon-strangeness correlations.
• In the context of heavy-ion collisions, the former is a consequence of quark number conservation of the strong interactions while the latter are sensitive probes of the character of QCD matter.
• We investigate the sensitivity of baryon-strangeness correlations on the freeze-out conditions of heavy-ion collisions by studying their dependence on temperature, baryon- and strangeness chemical potential.