Strangeness production from SPS to LHC

Abstract

Global strangeness production in relativistic heavy ion collisions at SPS and RHIC is reviewed. Special emphasis is put on the comparison with the statistical model and the canonical suppression mechanism. It is shown that recent RHIC data on strange particle production as a function of centrality can be explained by a superposition of a fully equilibrated hadron gas and particle emission from single independent nucleon-nucleon collisions in the outer corona.