Strange particle production in nuclear collisions at 200 GeV per nucleon

Strangeness enhancement inp+Aand S+Ainteractions at energies near 200AGeV

“…In this section, we compare strange particle production in the HIJING and VENUS models to pA and AA data. Again we limit the study to Λ,Λ, K 0 s to compare with recent data from Alber et al [18]. First we consider the average integrated multiplicities for negative hadrons < h − > , negative pions < π − > and neutral strange particles < K The mean multiplicities are compared in Table III (for pp and pA interactions) and in Table IV (for AA interactions) with experimental data from Alber et al [18].…”

“…Again we limit the study to Λ,Λ, K 0 s to compare with recent data from Alber et al [18]. First we consider the average integrated multiplicities for negative hadrons < h − > , negative pions < π − > and neutral strange particles < K The mean multiplicities are compared in Table III (for pp and pA interactions) and in Table IV (for AA interactions) with experimental data from Alber et al [18]. Note that while the HIJING model describes well the integrated neutral strange particle multiplicities (except for <Λ >) in pp and pA interactions, there is a large discrepancy already for the light ion S + S reaction.…”

“…It is worthwhile to mention that theoretical calculations have been done for pA 'minimum bias' collisions and the experimental data are for the events with charged particle multiplicity greater than five,which contain a significant fraction (about 90 %) of the 'minimum bias' events [18].…”

“…However, no systematic study of strangeness production at SPS-CERN energies were performed up to now. In addition, there have been substantial changes in the final published data [18] relative to earlier comparisons to preliminary data [7], [8]. In this paper, we calculate the rapidity and transverse momentum spectra of strange particles for pp , minimum bias collisions of pS, pAg, pAu and central collisions of S + S, Ag, Au, W at the energy of 200 AGeV and P b + P b at the energy of 170 AGeV .…”

“…We focus special emphasis on the comparison with the data on pp, pS, and SS from Alber et al [18]. That comparison reveals that much of the enhancement of strangeness in heavy ion collisions can be traced back to the enhancement of strangeness in the lightest nontrivial ion collisions, p + S. Our main conclusion based on these data is that the enhancement of strangeness observed in S + Au is therefore most likely due to new non-equilibrium multi-particle production mechanisms in processes involving few nucleon systems.…”