{"paper":{"title":"Evidence for differential kinetic freeze-out of the $\\phi(1020)$ meson in Pb-Pb collisions at $\\sqrt{s_{\\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"hep-ph","authors_text":"Amal Sarkar, Neeraj","submitted_at":"2026-06-30T06:07:09Z","abstract_excerpt":"In heavy-ion collisions, hadronic species with small interaction cross sections may decouple from the evolving fireball earlier than the bulk, yet quantitative evidence for this differential freeze-out has remained elusive. We report that the $\\phi(1020)$ meson does \\emph{not} kinetically freeze out with the bulk hadrons in 0--5\\% central Pb-Pb collisions at $\\sqrt{s_{\\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV: a Boltzmann-Gibbs blast-wave contour analysis of ALICE $\\phi(1020)$ $p_{\\rm T}$ transverse-momentum spectra shows that the bulk $\\pi/K/p$ freeze-out point is excluded at $4.1\\sigma$ ($\\Delta\\chi^2 = 21.7$). "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.31175","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.31175/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}