Strange Baryon to Meson Ratio

Abstract: We present a model to compute baryon and meson transverse momentum distributions, and their ratios, in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The model allows to compute the probability to form colorless bound states of either two or three quarks as functions of the evolving density during the collision. The qualitative differences of the baryon to meson ratio for different collision energies and for different particle species can be associated to the different density dependent probabilities and to the combinatorial factors which in turn depend on whether the quarks forming the bound states are heavy or light. We compare to experimental data and show that we obtain a good description up to intermediate values of $pt$.