Strangeness Production Incorporating Chiral Symmetry

Abstract

Chiral symmetry is known to be decisive for an understanding of the low energy sector of strong interactions. It is thus important for a model of relativistic heavy ion collisions to incorporate the dynamical breaking and restoration of chiral symmetry. Thus we study an expansion scenario for a quark-meson plasma using the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model in its three flavor version. The equations of motion for light and strange quarks as well as for pions, kaons and etas are solved using a QMD type algorithm, which is based on a parametrization of the Wigner function. The scattering processes incorporated into this calculation are of the types qq <--> qq, q\bar q <--> q\bar q, q\bar q <--> MM and M <--> q\bar q.