R. Bellwied et al., Time dependence of strange baryon freeze-out in relativistic heavy ion collisions - art. no. 054906, PHYS REV C, 6205(5), 2000, pp. 4906
We investigate chemical and thermal freeze-out time dependencies of strange
baryon production for CERN SPS heavy ion collisions in the framework of a
dynamical hadronic transport code. We show that the Lambda yield changes co
nsiderably after hadronization in the case of Pb+Pb collisions, whereas for
smaller system sizes (e.g., S+S) the direct particle production dominates
over production from inelastic rescattering. Chemical freeze-out times for
strange baryons in Pb+Pb are smaller than for nonstrange baryons, but they
are still sufficiently long for hadronic rescattering to contribute signifi
cantly to the final A yield.