Multi-Strange Hyperon Production in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

The main motivation for the relativistic heavy-ion physics programme is to identify and study a phase transition of nuclear matter to a deconfined system of quarks and gluons. One of the key signatures of this new state, known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), is an enhancement in the production of strange particles. The NA49 collaboration have measured cascade production in central Pb-Pb collisions at 158 GeV/c per nucleon. Based at CERN, Switzerland, NA49 is a large acceptance hadron spectrometer comprising four large volume time projection chambers. Singly and multi-strange hyperons are reconstructed by measuring the daughters and reconstructing the invariant mass. This thesis describes the procedure of obtaining the fully integrated yields and distributions in rapidity and transverse mass (and momentum) for XI sup - and XI-bar sup + hyperons. The integrated yields are found to be about 4.4 and 0.8 particles per central Pb-Pb collision for XI sup - and XI-bar sup + hyperons respectively. The inverse slope parameters are found to be about 270 MeV. Cascade production is found to be enhanced by factors of 12 and 6 for XI sup - and XI-bar sup + hyperons respectively, when comparing to a preliminary p-p measurement scaled by the average number of nucleons participating in the Pb-Pb collision. The measured mean lifetimes are consistent with the data book value.