Strange Particles from Dense Hadronic Matter

Abstract

After a brief survey of the remarkable accomplishments of the current heavy ion collision experiments up to 200A GeV, we address in depth the role of strange particle production in the search for new phases of matter in these collisions. In particular, we show that the observed enhancement pattern of otherwise rarely produced multistrange antibaryons can be consistently explained assuming color deconfinement in a localized, rapidly disintegrating hadronic source. We develop the theoretical description of this source, and in particular study QCD based processes of strangeness production in the deconfined, thermal quark-gluon plasma phase, allowing for approach to chemical equilibrium and dynamical evolution. We also address thermal charm production. Using a rapid hadronization model we obtain final state particle yields, providing detailed theoretical predictions about strange particle spectra and yields as function of heavy ion energy. Our presentation is comprehensive and self-contained: we introduce in considerable detail the procedures used in data interpretation, discuss the particular importance of selected experimental results and show how they impact the theoretical developments.

104 pages; published in Acta Physica Polonica B 27 (1996) 1037 -1140. Since this manuscript remains not accessible on publishers web page, but is of current interest as it contains predictions for presently measured strangeness excitation functions in SPS / Pb-Pb reactions (see e.g. section 7) we make here a second effort to make it accessible to wider public. ArXiv pagination differs from ours and we are attempting to debug, higher version may arise, text contents is identical

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