Quark Flavor Balancing in Nuclear Collisions

The notion of charge balance function, originally designed to study the evolution of charge production in heavy-ion collisions, is extended to consider quark flavor balancing. This extension is considered based on simulations performed with the PYTHIA 8 event generator in the context of pp collisions at √(s) = 13.6 TeV but can be trivially applied to any other scenario and implemented in measurements of correlated particle production in pp, pA, and AA collisions at colliders. Correlation of selected flavor balancing pairs are examined as function of the produced charged particle multiplicity. One finds that the amplitude of the correlations increases monotonically with the number of balanced flavors and the actual flavor content of correlated particles.