Speaker
Description
Relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce loosely bound hadronic molecules at a rate that is surprising large, since the molecules seem to emerge from a hadron gas whose temperature is orders of magnitude larger than their binding energies. These molecules have been referred to as "snowballs in hell". Their production has been explained in terms of a novel thermodynamic variable conjugate to the binding momentum of the molecule called the "contact". The production rate of a loosely bound molecule is proportional to the contact density at the kinetic freezeout of the hadron gas. The multiplicity of the molecule is determined by the temperature at kinetic freezeout and the multiplicities of its hadron constituents, and it depends very weakly on the binding energy of the molecule.
