What is so special about strangeness in hot matter?

Abstract

The production of strange particles in a hot medium as produced in collisions of heavy ions is considered one of the most important signals for the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma. In the first part of this lecture, the theoretical description of strangeness production in hot matter is outlined for a gas of quarks and gluons and for a hadronic gas and its impact on the deconfinement phase transition. Then in the second part, constraints from the underlying chiral symmetry of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) are utilized to extract signals with strangeness for the chiral phase transition in hot matter.