Baryon-antibaryon annihilation and reproduction in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

The quark rearrangement model for baryon-antibaryon annihilation and reproduction (BB↔3M)--incorporated in the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach--is extended to the strangeness sector. A derivation of the transition probabilities for the three-body processes is presented and a strangeness suppression factor for the invariant matrix element squared is introduced to account for the higher mass of the strange quark compared to the light up and down quarks. In simulations of the baryon-antibaryon annihilation and reformation in a box with periodic boundary conditions, we demonstrate that our numerical implementation fulfills detailed balance on a channel-by-channel basis for more than 2000 individual 2↔3 channels. Furthermore, we study central Pb+Pb collisions within PHSD from 11.7AGeV to 158AGeV and investigate the impact of the additionally implemented reaction channels in the strangeness sector. We find that the new reaction channels have a visible impact essentially only on the rapidity spectra of antibaryons. The spectra with the additional channels in the strangeness sector are closer to the experimental data than without for all antihyperons. Due to the chemical redistribution between baryons-antibaryons and mesons we find a slightly larger production of antiprotons thus moderately overestimating the available experimental data. We additionally address the question if the antibaryon spectra (with strangeness) from central heavy-ion reactions at these energies provide further information on the issue of chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement. However, by comparing transport results with and without partonic phase as well as including and excluding effects from chiral symmetry restoration we find no convincing signals in the strange antibaryon sector for either transition due to the strong final-state interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]