Strangeness Excitation Function in Heavy Ion Collisions

We study the strangeness content of the fireball created in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy ion Collider (RHIC) and at the CERN-Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). Allowing for both chemical equilibrium and chemical nonequilibrium we obtain strangeness per baryon and per entropy in the energy range 8.75\lessim\sqrt{s_{NN}}\lessim 200AGeV. A baryon density independent study of the kaon to pion ratio spanning lower energy domain is presented.