Light Flavor Spectra Physics Working Group

In high-energy nuclear collisions, light flavored quarks (up, down, and strange) are produced in large quantities. Three major themes capture most of the topics that are considered part of the Light-Flavor Spectra Physics Working Group:

• Bulk properties of the produced particles: by measuring the momenta spectra of  light-quark-flavor hadron spectra and assuming a thermalized system, we determine the system properties such as the temperature and the baryon chemical potential.
• The masses of the light flavor quarks are expected to be modified by the surrounding strongly interacting medium. While the heavy quarks (charm, bottom, and top) have masses that agree with the mass expectations from a Higgs mechanism, the light quarks appear to have gained a significant constituent-quark mass.This mechanism, the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and the restoration of this symmetry is expected to occur in the hot and dense quark matter.
• Leptons are an ideal probe in determining the properties of the hot and dense medium. With only little interaction with the strongly interacting medium, electrons and muons travel practically unperturbed through it. The inclusive di-lepton invariant mass distribution contains a wealth of physics, ranging from the leptonic decay of vector mesons, to the Drell-Yan pair production, and thermal radiation processes.

In addition, this physics working group has been key in the analyses that led to the recent observations of anti-hypertriton, and anti-⁴He.

In what follows, we showcase  in each of the main areas several of recently published results that originated from this physics working group.