Thermochemical equilibrium and strangeness production at freeze-out in S-S collisions at 200 GeV A-1

In the framework of our recently proposed model for the hadronic gas, the CERN NA35 collaboration data from central SS collisions at 200 GeV A(-1) are analysed. The model which provides a thermodynamically consistent equation of state (EOS) of hot hadronic matter consisting of hadrons with hard-core repulsion, is used to analyse the relative and absolute abundance of strange (antistrange) particles in full phase space. The analysis yields information regarding the thermal parameters at freeze-out, namely the light-quark fugacity lambda(q), the strange quark fugacity lambda(s), the temperature T and the strangeness phase-space saturation factor gamma(s). For the sake of comparison a similar analysis is performed by making use of the thermodynamically inconsistent model EOS. These results are further compared with those of Sollfrank er al obtained earlier by ignoring the hard-core hadronic repulsion and treating all hadrons as point particles and also those of Braun-Munzinger er al for limited phase-space data. Our models are generalized to allow for non-equilibrium strange-particle abundances.