Strangeness production in the quark gluon plasma

Abstract

It is shown that perturbative QCD predicts abundant strange quark production in the plasma created in high energy nuclear collisions. Considering further the strange particle production in the hadronic gas phase, I show that the strangeness abundance in the plasma is 10–50 times higher as compared with the gas phase in similar thermodynamic conditions. Possible experiments leading to the identification of the plasma phase are described.