Quark and diquark fragmentation into neutral strange particles as observed in muon-proton interactions at 280 GeV

Abstract The production of K 0 s, Λs and Λ s has been studied in a 280 GeV muon-proton scattering experiment with almost complete coverage of all kinematic regions. A study is made of the dependence of the multiplicities on the hadronic centre of mass energy, W , and of the Feynman x distributions. It is found that K 0 and Λ production is mostly central and increases strongly with W , whereas Λ production comes mainly from the remnant target system and is only weakly W dependent.