High Energy Hadron Production as Self-Organized Criticality

In high energy nuclear collisions, production rates of light nuclei as well as those of hadrons and hadronic resonances agree with the predictions of an ideal gas at a temperature T = 155 +/- 10 MeV. In an equilibrium medium of this temperature, light nuclei cannot survive. We propose that the observed behavior is due to an evolution in global non-equilibrium, leading to self-organized criticality. At the confinement point, the initial quark-gluon medium becomes quenched by the vacuum, breaking up into all allowed free hadronic and nuclear mass states, without formation of any subsequent thermal hadronic medium.