Phenomenology of Strangeness enhancement in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We give an overview of the phenomenology of strangeness enhancement in heavy ion collisions, within the paradigm of the statistical model of particle production. We argue that, while strangeness enhancement data is suggestive of a phase transition, the mechanism triggering enhancement is still elusive. We study the feasibility to constrain this mechanism by determining the scaling variable of strangeness enhancement. We further argue that to test the applicability of the statistical model generally, and to confirm our interpretation of the statistical physics responsible for strangeness enhancement, the scaling of strange particle fluctuations ($K/\pi$ and other particles) w.r.t. yields has to be explored.

Plenary talk, SQM2008, Beijing, China Minor stylistic revisions, discussion on scaling of enhancement added, references updated

References in corpus (10)

• Universal properties of bulk viscosity near the QCD phase transition
• Extracting the QGP viscosity from RHIC data -- a status report from viscous hydrodynamics
• Bulk Viscosity driven clusterization of quark-gluon plasma and early freeze-out in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• SHAREv2: fluctuations and a comprehensive treatment of decay feed-down
• Fast Equilibration of Hadrons in an Expanding Fireball
• Strangeness production at SPS energies
• Ion Program of Na61/Shine at the CERN SPS
• Scaling of $v_2$ in heavy ion collisions
• Overview of Strangeness Production at the STAR Experiment
• Resonances and fluctuations of strange particle in 200 GeV Au-Au collisions

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Strange hadron production in heavy ion collisions from SPS to RHIC
• Dynamics of particle production in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV using PYTHIA8 Angantyr model
• Strangeness chemical potential from the baryons relative to the kaons particle ratios
• My strange times with Johann Rafelski