Strange Particle Production at RHIC

Abstract

We report STAR measurements of mid-rapidity yields for the $\Lambda$, $\bar{\Lambda }$, $K_S^0$, ${\Xi }^{-}$, ${\bar{\Xi }}^{+}$, ${\Omega }^{-}$, and ${\bar{\Omega }}^{+}$ particles in Cu+Cu and Au+Au $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV collisions. We show that at a given number of participating nucleons, bulk strangeness production is higher in Cu+Cu collisions compared to Au+Au collisions at the same center of mass energy, counter to predictions from the Canonical formalism. We compare both the Cu+Cu and Au+Au yields to AMPT and EPOS predictions, and find they reproduce key qualitative aspects of the data. Finally, we investigate other scaling parameters and find bulk strangeness production for both the measured data and theoretical predictions, scales better with the number participants that undergo more than one collision.

Conference proceedings for Hot Quarks 2008, 5 pages and 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Core-Corona Separation in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Enhanced strange baryon production in Au+Au collisions compared to p+p at sqrts = 200 GeV
• Strangeness production from SPS to LHC
• Strangeness and bulk freeze-out properties at RHIC