Production of minijets (gluons) and strangeness enhancement in pA and AA collisions at relativistic energies

The idea that effective string tension increases as a result of the hard gluon kinks on a string is applied to study the strange particle production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions. It is found that the effective string tension increases with the increase of centrality and mass of the colliding system as a consequence of the minijet (gluon) production stemming from the collective string-string interaction. This mechanism leads to strangeness enhancement in pA and AA collisions through the enhanced production of the strange quark pairs from the color field of strings. We discuss different roles played by this mechanism and rescattering of the final state hadrons in the production of strange particles and compare our results with experimental data.