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 [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]MeV. In an equilibrium hadronic 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.