Recent Results on Strangeness and Heavy Flavour at RHIC

The advent of RHIC has opened up the possibilities for a greater understanding of the hadronization process in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The large volume of data collected, together with high collisions energies, allows us to address both strangeness and charm production in great detail. This paper will present results on bulk strangeness production in Au+Au collisions at √S_NN = 200 GeV, in particular on strangeness enhancement and strange quark scaling. Also presented are results on strange particle ratios and elliptic flow measurements in the intermediate pT region, together with comparisons with theoretical models. An excitation function of strangeness yields and ratios are also presented with reference to the newly acquired Au+Au data at √S_NN = 62.4 GeV.

Also presented in this paper are the first results on charm production measured in STAR. Utilising the methods of reconstructing D mesons through their leptonic channels, the crosssection for charm production in d+Au collisions at √S_NN = 200 GeV is presented. Also shown is a first measurement of the elliptic flow of charmed mesons.