Strangeness Production and Color Deconfinement

Abstract

The relative multiplicities for hadron production in different high energy collisions are in general well described by an ideal gas of all hadronic resonances, except that under certain conditions, strange particle rates are systematically reduced. We show that the suppression factor gamma_s, accounting for reduced strange particle rates in pp, pA and AA collisions at different collision energies, becomes a universal function when expressed in terms of the initial entropy density s_0 or the initial temperature T of the produced thermal medium. It is found that gamma_s increases from about 0.5 to 1.0 in a narrow temperature range around the quark-hadron transition temperature T_c = 160 MeV. Strangeness suppression thus disappears with the onset of color deconfinement; subsequently, full equilibrium resonance gas behavior is attained.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Hadron yields and the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter
• The Thermal Production of Strange and Non-Strange Hadrons in e+e- Collisions
• Chemical freeze-out in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions at sqrt(s)_NN = 130 and 200 GeV
• Intrinsic Fluctuations of the Proton Saturation Momentum Scale in High Multiplicity p+p Collisions
• Universal Strangeness Production in Hadronic and Nuclear Collisions
• Strangeness Production in AA and pp Collisions

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Universality in Hadronic and Nuclear Collisions at High Energy
• Strangeness enhancement and flow-like effects in $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation at high parton density
• Role of system size on freezeout conditions extracted from transverse momentum spectra of hadrons
• Addendum to Strangeness Production and Color Deconfinement
• Sequential hadronization in heavy ion collisions
• An appropriate statistical approach for nonequilibrium particle production