Strange Particle Production in pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 7 TeV measured with the ALICE Experiment

Abstract

Hadrons measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 7 TeV with the ALICE detector have been identified using various techniques: the specific energy loss and the time-of flight information for charged pions, kaons and protons, the displaced vertex resulting from their weak decay for K0, Lambda and Xi and the kink topology of decaying charged kaons. These various particle identification tools give the best separation at different momentum ranges and the results are combined to obtain spectra from pt = 100 MeV/c to 2.5 GeV/c. This allows to extract total yields. In detail we discuss the K/pi ratio together with previous measurements and we show a fit using a statistical approach.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the ICPAQGP2010 conference in Goa, India, December 6th - 10th, 201