The event horizon of confinement

Abstract

Color confinement constitutes for quarks and gluons something like an event horizon which they can never cross. Signals transmitted to the outside world from inside such a horizon cannot contain information and must thus be of thermal nature. In this chapter, we consider multihadron production in high energy collisions as the QCD counterpart of Hawking-Unruh radiation, encountered in black holes and for accelerated observers. This is shown to provide a common, “non-kinetic” origin for thermal multihadron production.