Evolution of strangeness in equilibrating and expanding quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

We evaluate the strangeness production from equilibrating and transversely expanding quark gluon plasma which may be created in the wake of relativistic heavy ion collisions. We consider boost invariant longitudinal and cylindrically symmetric transverse expansion of a gluon dominated partonic plasma, which is in local thermal equilibrium. Initial conditions obtained from the self screened parton cascade model are used. We empirically find that the final extent of the partonic equilibration rises almost linearly with the square of the initial energy density. This along with the corresponding variation with the number of participants may help us distinguish between various models of parton production.

Comments: RevTex, 10 pages including 6 figures comprising 11 postscript files, text modified considerably with an added figure (Fig. 6) and this version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. C