Strangeness enhancement across collision systems without a plasma

Abstract

We present novel rope hadronization results for strange hadron enhancement in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions using PYTHIA/Angantyr at LHC energies. With the rope model for string fragmentation, we find that the strangeness and baryon enhancement has a coherent increase across all collision systems as a function of average charged central multiplicity, in qualitative agreement with LHC data. In AA collisions, we find that the baryonic yields overshoot data at high multiplicities, and we discuss how a combination of rope hadronization with other string interactions may tame this rise.