Locally anisotropic momentum distributions of hadrons at freeze-out in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

A spheroidal anisotropic local momentum distribution is implemented in the statistical model of hadron production. We show that this form leads to exactly the same ratios of hadronic abundances as the equilibrium distributions, if the temperature is identified with a characteristic transverse-momentum scale. Moreover, to a very good approximation the transverse-momentum spectra of hadrons are the same for isotropic and anisotropic systems, provided the size of the system at freeze-out is appropriately adjusted. We further show that this invariance may be used to improve the agreement between the model and experimental HBT results.