Strangeness production in small and large collisions systems at RHIC

Abstract

We present measurements of strange and multi-strange hadrons in p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s}$= 200 GeV measured by STAR. We will compare these preliminary results to leading-order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD models widely believed to describe the production mechanisms. In particular we will point out recent changes of the model calculations which improve the agreement with our data significantly and will discuss the physics consequences. In larger collision systems, produced with heavy ions at RHIC, we observe the centrality dependence of strange and multi-strange particle production. The non-linear dependency between (anti)-hyperon yields and the system size \Npart seems to indicate that the correlation volume does not scale exactly with \Npart in contradiction to previous assumptions by thermal models.