Exact flavor conservation at the quark level in causal clusters: strange particles, protons and light nuclei in small collision systems

The suppression of strange hadrons in pp and p--Pb collisions at the LHC, including the $ϕ$ meson, has recently been described by the exact conservation of strangeness imposed on the quarks of a causally connected cluster before hadronization. Here we extend this approach to the light flavors. The n