An effective model with constituent quarks as fundamental degrees of freedom is used to predict the relative strangeness production pattern in both high energy elementary and heavy ion collisions. The basic picture is that of the statistical hadronization model, with hadronizing color-singlet clusters assumed to be at full chemical equilibrium at constituent quark level. Thus, by assuming that at least the ratio between strange and non-strange constituent quarks survives in the final hadrons, the apparent undersaturation of strange particle phase space observed in the data can be accounted for. In this framework, the enhancement of relative strangeness production in heavy ion collisions in comparison with elementary collisions is mainly owing to the excess of initial nonstrange matter over antimatter and the so-called canonical suppression, namely, the constraint of exact color and flavor conservation over small volumes.

• Received 7 May 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.67.015205