The horn, the hadron mass spectrum and the QCD phase diagram - the statistical model of hadron production in central nucleus-nucleus collisions

Abstract

We present the status of the description of hadron production in central nucleus-nucleus collisions within the statistical model . The recent inclusion of very high-mass resonances and the sigma meson leads to an improved description of the data, in particular the energy dependence of the K+/pi+ ratio at SPS energies (``the horn''). The connection to the QCD phase diagram is discussed.

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures; presented at the Nucleus-Nucleus 2009 conference, Beijing, Aug. 2009