Strangeness in ALICE at the LHC

Abstract

Strangeness production has been measured by the ALICE experiment in different collision systems at the unprecedented center-of-mass energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In Pb–Pb collisions at TeV the relative production of strange and multi-strange baryons relative to pions is observed to follow a saturating trend with increasing centrality, and reaching values that are consistent with those predicted by thermal model calculations in the Grand-Canonical ensemble. More recently, the multiplicity dependence of strangeness production in small systems such as pp and p–Pb has also been investigated. An overview of the most recent results on strangeness production is reported, including the first observation of strangeness enhancement with charged particle multiplicity in pp collisions.