Strangeness production in STAR

TL;DR

This paper analyzes strangeness enhancement in Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions at 200 GeV, revealing system size effects and the impact of statistical models on strange particle production.

Contribution

It compares strangeness production in different collision systems and explores the influence of statistical ensemble choices on the results.

Findings

Higher relative yields in central Cu+Cu compared to peripheral Au+Au.

Strangeness enhancement depends strongly on the canonical correlation volume.

Grand-Canonical fits show little system size dependence.

Abstract

We present a summary of strangeness enhancement results comparing data from Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions at sqrt(SNN) = 200GeV measured by the STAR experiment. Relative yields in central Cu+Cu data seem to be higher than the equivalent sized peripheral Au+Au collision. In addition, strange particle production from these two systems is compared in terms of a statistical model, applying a Grand-Canonical ensemble and also applying a canonical correlation volume for the strange particles. Thermal fit results from the Grand-Canonical formalism shows little dependence on the system size but, when considering a strange canonical ensemble, strangeness enhancement shows a strong dependency on the correlation volume.