Strangeness Production at the HERA-B Experiment

Abstract

HERA-B is a fixed target experiment at the 920 GeV HERA proton beam at DESY which uses a variety of nuclear targets. During the last data taking period from Nov. 2002 to Feb. 2003, 200 million minimum bias events were recorded. A large sample of V^0(K_zero, Lambda_zero, Lambda_zero_bar), approximately 20000 cascade hyperons Xi^(-/+) and 1200 Omega^(-/+) over low background were reconstructed using these data. About 1 million K^*(892) --> K pi and 60,000 phi(1020) --> K^+K^- decays in central production $(-0.15 < x_F < 0.1, 0.5 < p_t^2 < 12.1 (GeV/c)^2 were analyzed. Preliminary results for differential p_t^2 spectra, atomic numeber dependence and anti-particle to particle ratios are presented.