We conjecture that because of color confinement, the physical vacuum forms an
event horizon for quarks and gluons which can be crossed only by quantum
tunneling, i.e., through the QCD counterpart of Hawking radiation by black
holes. Since such radiation cannot transmit information to the outside, it must
be thermal, of a temperature determined by the chromodynamic force at the
confinement surface, and it must maintain color neutrality. We explore the
possibility that the resulting process provides a common mechanism for thermal
hadron production in high energy interactions, from e+e− annihilation to
heavy ion collisions.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figure
