What do we learn from strangeness at RHIC?

Abstract

I discuss strangeness as a tool for studying the reaction and hadronization dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. In particular, I focus on quark-number scaling of elliptic flow as a tool to determine the nature of hadronization as well as to quantify the amount of collective flow the strange quarks carry and discuss the use of (multi-)strange hadron radial flow and interferometry for characterizing the collective expansion and emitting source dimensions of a hadronizing quark-gluon-plasma.

Stranger in a strange land

“…how they scale with the initial nuclear geometry. There is some motivation to this approach if one realizes that a substantial fraction of strangeness should be expected to be formed via perturbative processes [13].…”