Strange hadron production in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow><mml:mi>Au</mml:mi><mml:mo>+</mml:mo><mml:mi>Au</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:math> collisions at <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow><mml:msqrt><mml:msub><mml:mi>s</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>N</mml:mi><mml:mi>N</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:msqrt><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mn>7.7</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math>, 11.5, 19.6, 27, and 39 GeV
J. Adam, L. Adamczyk, J. R. Adams, J. K. Adkins, G. Agakishiev, M. M. Aggarwal, Z. Ahammed, I. Alekseev, D. M. Anderson, Y. G., A. Aparin, D. Arkhipkin, E. C. Aschenauer, M. U. Ashraf, F. Atetalla, A. Attri, G. S. Averichev, V. Bairathi, K. Barish, A. J. Bassill, A. Behera, R. Bellwied, A. Bhasin, A. K. Bhati, J. Bielcik, J. Bielcikova, L. C. Bland, I. G. Bordyuzhin, J. D. Brandenburg, A. V. Brandin, J. Bryslawskyj, I. Bunzarov, J. M. Butterworth, H. Caines, M. Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, D. Cebra, I. Chakaberia, P. Chaloupka, B. K. Chan, F-H. Chang, Z. Chang, N. Chankova-Bunzarova, A. Chatterjee, S. Chattopadhyay, J. H. Chen, X. Chen, J. Cheng, M. Cherney, W. Christie, H. J. Crawford, M. Csanád, S. Das, T. G. Dedovich, I. M. Deppner, A. A. Derevschikov, L. Didenko, C. Dilks, X. Dong, J. L. Drachenberg, J. C. Dunlop, T. Edmonds, N. Elsey, J. Engelage, G. Eppley, R. Esha, S. Esumi, O. Evdokimov, J. Ewigleben, O. Eyser, R. Fatemi, S. Fazio, P. Federic, J. Fedorišin, Yanting Feng, P. Filip, E. Finch, Y. Fisyak, Ł. Fulek, C. A. Gagliardi, T. Galatyuk, F. J. M. Geurts, S. M. Gibson, K. Gopal, D. Grosnick, A. Gupta, W. Guryn, A. I. Hamad, A. Hamed, J. W. Harris, Li-Ping He, S. Heppelmann, S. Heppelmann, N. Herrmann, L. Holub, Y. Hong, S. Horvat, B. Huang, R.G. Huang, S. L. Huang, T. Huang
Abstract
Strange hadrons are an excellent probe for identifying the phase boundary and onset of deconfinement in the QCD phase diagram. The STAR Collaboration has performed precision measurements of the abundances and transverse-momentum distributions for 8 species of strange mesons and baryons, as functions of centrality during a Au+Au beam-energy scan at RHIC. The results point to a possible change in strange-hadron production dynamics for $\sqrt{{s}_{N\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}N}}<20$ GeV. The results significantly improve the experimental knowledge in the energy range where key features of the QCD phase diagram are nowadays being studied.