Speaker
Description
Thanks to its eycellent vertey reconstruction and particle identification capabilities, the LHCb detector is particularly well-suited for studying the production and polarization of strange particles. Since the origin of hyperon polarization in unpolarized proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions remains not fully understood, measurements across various collision systems and kinematic ranges are essential. This contribution presents recent LHCb results on strange hyperon production and polarization in proton-lead collisions, highlighting their implications for hadronization in small collision systems and for transverse-momentum-dependent parton distributions and fragmentation functions. In parallel, ongoing studies are exploring the role of vorticity as a possible source of the observed non-zero polarization.
