Strangeness production time and the K+/pi+ horn

Abstract

We construct a hadronic kinetic model which describes production of strange particles in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions in the energy domain of SPS. We test this model on description of the sharp peak in the excitation function of multiplicity ratio K+/pi+ and demonstrate that hadronic model reproduces these data rather well. The model thus must be tested on other types of data in order to verify the hypothesis that deconfinement sets in at lowest SPS energies.