Evidence of rescattering effect in Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC through production of K(892)0⁎ and ϕ(1020) mesons

$$K^{*}(892)^0$$ meson production in inelastic p+p interactions at 158 $$\text{ Ge }\text{ V }\!/\!c$$ beam momentum measured by NA61/SHINEat the CERN SPS

“…The ratio of K * /K production (K * stands for K * (892) 0 , K * (892) 0 or K * ± , and K denotes K + or K − ) showed a decrease with increasing system size as expected due to the increasing rescattering time between chemical and kinetic freeze-out. The same effect was recently reported also by the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [9][10][11][12].…”

“…The fitted function (solid line) is given by Eq. (12). The numerical values are listed in Table 3 and the fitted inverse slope parameters T for each bin are given in the legends where:…”

“…The results for p+p collisions provide an important baseline for heavier nucleus-nucleus systems. So far the K * 0 /K − ratio for p+p interactions did not show large differences between the top RHIC and four LHC energies [10,12,15,16]. Most of the results at lower energies are less reliable due to large uncertainties, see the compilation in Ref.…”

“…[15], and new points in Refs. [4,10,12,16]. This emphasizes the need to obtain high precision p+p data at energies lower than the top RHIC energy.…”

“…The study of K * (892) 0 and/or K * (892) 0 production in p+p collisions at RHIC energies was performed by the STAR [5] and PHENIX [19] experiments and at LHC ener-gies by ALICE [10,12,15,16,18,20]. The NA49 experiment performed the measurements in inelastic p+p collisions at beam momentum of 158 GeV/c (CERN SPS) [4].…”