Thermal kaon production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

We study kaon production in hot and dense hypernuclear matter with a conserved zero total strangeness and a conserved small negative isospin charge fraction in order to make our results relevant to relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The baryons and kaons are treated as MIT bags in the context of the modified quark-meson coupling model. They interact with each other via the scalar mesons sigma sigma* and the vector mesons omega, phi as well as the isovector meson rho. We adopt realistic sets of hyperon-hyperon interactions based on several versions of the Nijmegen core potential models. Our results indicate that the hyperons as well as the kaons are produced abundantly when the temperature increases and approaches the critical temperature for the phase transition to a quark-gluon plasma. Moreover we find that the kaons are only produced thermally and we find no kaon condensation in the regime explored by relativistic heavy-ion collisions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.