EXPERIMENT NA57 AT THE CERN SPS

Experiment NA57 studies the production of strange and multi-strange baryons and antibaryons in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at the SPS. The principal aim of NA57 is to investigate the existence of an onset for the strangeness enhancement effect at the variation of the energy and centrality (i.e. number of participants) of the nucleus-nucleus collisions. The experiment was successfully installed and commissioned in 1997.