What is so special about strangeness in hot matter?

Abstract

The production of strange particles in a hot medium as produced in collisions of heavy ions is considered one of the most important signals for the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma. In the first part of this lecture, the theoretical description of strangeness production in hot matter is outlined for a gas of quarks and gluons and for a hadronic gas and its impact on the deconfinement phase transition. Then in the second part, constraints from the underlying chiral symmetry of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) are utilized to extract signals with strangeness for the chiral phase transition in hot matter.

22 pages, 9 figures, to be published as topical review for Journal of Physics G

References in corpus (5)

• rho^0 Production and Possible Modification in Au+Au and p+p Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• HTL Perturbation Theory to Two Loops
• Evidence for nonhadronic degrees of freedom in the transverse mass spectra of kaons from relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions?
• $K^{-}/K^{+}$ ratio in heavy-ion collisions at GSI with an antikaon self-energy in hot and dense matter
• What is so special about strangeness in hot matter?

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Strange hadron production in heavy ion collisions from SPS to RHIC
• Transient field fluctuations effects in d+Au and Au+Au collisions at \sqrt{s_nn} = 200 GeV
• Strong Color Field Baryonic Remnants in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at 200A GeV
• What is so special about strangeness in hot matter?
• Multi-strange baryon correlations at RHIC