Signatures of chiral symmetry restoration and its survival throughout the hadronic phase interactions.

The effect of the chiral symmetry restoration (CSR) on observables from heavy-ion collisions is studied in the energy range √s_NN=3-20 GeV within the Parton- Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. The PHSD includes the deconfinement phase transition as well as essential aspects of CSR in the dense and hot hadronic medium, which are incorporated in the Schwinger mechanism for the hadronic particle production. We adopt different parametrizations of the nuclear equation of state from the non-linear σ - ω model, which enter in the computation of the quark scalar density for the CSR mechanism, in order to estimate the uncertainty in our calculations. For the pion-nucleon Σ-term we adopt Σπ ≈ 45 MeV which corresponds to a 'world average'. Our systematic studies show that chiral symmetry restoration plays a crucial role in the description of heavy-ion collisions at √s_NN=3-20 GeV, realizing an increase of the hadronic particle production in the strangeness sector with respect to the non-strange one. We identify particle abundances and rapidity spectra to be suitable probes in order to extract information about CSR, while transverse mass spectra are less sensitive ones. Our results provide a microscopic explanation for the "horn" structure in the excitation function of the K⁺/π⁺ ratio: the CSR in the hadronic phase produces the steep increase of this particle ratio up to √s_NN ≈ 7 GeV, while the drop at higher energies is associated to the appearance of a deconfined partonic medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]