Maximum Strangeness Content in Heavy Ion Collisions

Strangeness production in heavy ion collisions at relativistic energies provides one of the key information about the reaction mechanism and could indicate the onset of new phenomena. The attempts to describe the measured particle ratios including strange hadrons at AGS and SPS and recently also at RHIC using a strangeness fugacity are very successful [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. However, the usual grand-canonical treatment of strangeness conservation is not sufficient, if the number of strange particles is small [6]. This requires local strangeness conservation which is done in the statistical model using the canonical formulation of strangeness conservation [7].