constituent quark scaling of strangeness enhancement in heavy-ion collisions

In the framework of a nuclear overlap model, we estimate the number of nucleons and quark participants in proton-proton, proton-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions. We observe the number of nucleon- ( N N -part -) normalized enhancement of multistrange particles, which shows a monotonic increase with centrality and turns out to be a centrality-independent scaling behavior when normalized to number of constituent quarks participating in the collision ( N q -part ). In addition, we observe that the N q -part -normalized enhancement, when further normalized to the strangeness content, shows a strangeness-independent scaling behavior. This holds good at top RHIC energy. However, the corresponding SPS data show a weak N q -part -scaling. Moreover, the strangeness scaling seems to be violated at top SPS energy. This scaling at RHIC indicates that the partonic degrees of freedom play an important role in the production of multistrange particles. Top SPS energy, in view of the above observations, shows a coexistence of hadronic and partonic phases. Therefore we give a comparison of data with HIJING, AMPT, and UrQMD models to understand the particle production dynamics at different energies.