The origin of the K ∗ suppression at the LHC

Abstract

Abstract When relativistic heavy ions collide, a plasma of quarks and gluons is created. It expands, cools down and eventually reaches the hadronization temperature, when a hadron gas phase is formed. In this phase, K ∗ and K can interact with light mesons and change their abundances with respect to the predictions of statistical hadronization models. In a previous article, we studied the effect of the cooling of the gas, the freeze-out temperature and the interaction cross sections on the K ∗/K yield ratio. In the present work, we investigate the effect of the different reaction mechanisms on this ratio. Our analysis showns that, out of all the possible interactions that the K ∗ and K mesons can undergo in the hadron gas, only the K ∗ decay and its inverse mechanism are indeed necessary to give a good description the observed yield in several collision systems studied by the ALICE collaboration.