Strange Fluctuations at RHIC

Relativistic nuclear collisions can produce matter in which chiral symmetry is restored. One possible consequence of this restoration is the formation of disoriented chiral condensates (DCC) – transient regions in which the average chiral order parameter differs from its value in the surrounding vacuum. Previous efforts to describe DCC signals have focused on pion production. In Ref. [1], Gavin and Kapusta explored the possible influence of DCC on kaon production, inspired by an explanation by Kapusta and Wong [2] of measurements of Ω and Ω baryon enhancement at the CERN SPS, as discussed by Wong in these proceedings. If true, Ref. [2] implies that the evolution of the condensate has a substantial strange component and, therefore, can produce kaon isospin fluctuations. A further implication is that the DCC regions must be rather small, with a size of about 2 fm, in accord with predictions based on dynamical simulations of the two flavor linear sigma model. Such a size is consistent with WA98 results reported here, which reveal no evidence of large DCC domains in neutral and charged pions. In this talk we study kaon isospin fluctuations in the presence of many small DCC; both kaon and pion fluctuations were addressed in [1]. In the next section we discuss how DCC may lead to kaon fluctuations and propose statistical observables to detect them. In sec. 3 we present work in progress on event generator simulations to understand the magnitude and centrality dependence of these observables in the absence of DCC.