is approximately the same as for a single string.

Although such a stepwise breakup of a rope is assumed in most studies, also an immediate breakup by production of multi-quark–antiquark systems has been advocated by Amelin, Braun, and Pajares [@Amelin:1994mc] (also mentioned as a possibility in ref. [@Biro:1984]), and a breakup by the production of gluon pairs has been studied by Gyulassy and Iwazaki [@Gyulassy:1986jq]. It has also been suggested that a rapid decay of the ropes into elementary partons is facilitating the formation of a quark–gluon plasma [@Gyulassy:1986jq; @Gatoff:1987uf; @Braun:1997ch].

It was early suggested that, if the charges correspond to a specific SU(3) multiplet, the tension (or energy density) in the rope is given by the second Casimir operator [@Ambjorn:1984dp]. For an isolated rope this conjecture has later been supported by lattice calculations [@Bali:2000un]. However, if the rope is surrounded by other strings or ropes, we expect that the transverse area, and thus the rope tension, will be affected by the presence of the neighbouring ropes, which exert a pressure keeping the radius small. Such a pressure might also cause a collective expansion contributing to extra transverse momentum for the hadrons. It ought to be kept in mind, that 