Study of the full Probability Density Function for strange hadron production in pp collisions with ALICE.

Measurements of strange hadron production in pp and p-Pb collisions have been used as a reference for the study of quark-gluon plasma formation in heavy-ion collisions. Recently, further studies by the ALICE Collaboration unveiled unexpected features in the yield ratio of strange hadrons to pions. These observations have been obtained by a statistical analysis of the number of strange particles in a given set of inelastic pp events; in this sense, formation rates account for the average of the Probability Density Function (PDF) underlying the production mechanism. More insightful information on the production of strange particles and, in general, on hadronization would come from the knowledge of the full PDF. In this work, a new event-by-event technique for extracting the full PDF for single and multi-strange hadron production will be illustrated. The analysis technique involves topological selection of the particle decay chain, signal extraction with invariant mass weights and an unfolding procedure which profits from realistic Monte Carlo simulations. First estimates on the statistical accuracy achievable by analyzing LHC Run 2 data will be discussed.