UC Berkeley

The centrality dependence of strange ( , ) and multistrange ( , ) hadron production is measured by ALICE in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair TeV, using the full dataset collected during the LHC Run 2 campaign in the years 2015 and 2018. This is the largest heavy-ion dataset analyzed to date at the LHC, and it allows for the extraction of transverse momentum ( ) spectra and -integrated yields with unprecedented precision, over a broad range of charged particle multiplicity densities ( ), probing regions where smaller collision system ( and -Pb) results are also available. The spectra evolve with centrality, featuring higher in central events for all particles. The ratio exhibits the distinctive baryon-to-meson enhancement in the intermediate region, with a maximum which is shifted to larger for more central collisions. The hadron-to-pion yield ratios are presented as a function of and compared to results from different collision systems and energies. A smooth connection from to Pb-Pb is observed, thus demonstrating that collision system or energy do not play a role in the multiplicity evolution of this observable. The previously reported enhancement of strangeness production in the multiplicity range probed in and -Pb collisions saturates in the multiplicity range of Pb-Pb data. These results constitute a key test bench for theoretical models and a first comparison to the EPOS 4 generator is presented.