STRANGENESS PRODUCTION IN ULTRA-RELATIVISTIC HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS - FLAVOR KINETICS .2.

A recently presented model for the non-equilibrium expansion and hadronization of and the strangeness production in a quark-gluon plasma is developed further. The model includes all members of the lowest flavour SU(3) multiplets, the effect of particle evaporation from the surface of the system and a hydrodynamic treatment of the volume expansion. The evaporation and the decay of resonances are found to be equally important for the production of pions and kaons, and to give about 60% of the total yield. If a quark-gluon plasma is formed, the relative strangeness yield is strongly enhanced compared to pp collisions. The predictions of the model are also compared to recent data for nucleus-nucleus collisions.