Enhancement of singly and multiply strangeness in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at 158A GeV/c

TL;DR

This paper investigates how increased string tension, related to energy and system size, enhances strange particle production in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at 158A GeV/c, explaining observed centrality and strangeness content effects.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism linking string tension to strange quark suppression, explaining the enhancement of strange particles in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Strange particle enhancement increases with system size and centrality.

The model accounts for the observed increase in strange quark content.

Results align with WA97 experimental observations.

Abstract

The idea that the reduction of the strange quark suppression in string fragmentation leads to the enhancement of strange particle yield in nucleus-nucleus collisions is applied to study the singly and multiply strange particle production in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at 158A GeV/c. In this mechanism the strange quark suppression factor is related to the effective string tension, which increases in turn with the increase of the energy, of the centrality and of the mass of colliding system. The WA97 observation that the strange particle enhancement increases with the increasing of centrality and of strange quark content in multiply strange particles in Pb-Pb collisions with respect to p-Pb collisions was accounted reasonably.