Strangeness conservation in hot nuclear fireballs

Within a thermal model generalized to allow for nonequilibrium strange particle abundances we study how the constraint that the balance of strangeness in a fireball is (nearly) zero impacts the allowable thermal fireball parameters. Using the latest data of the CERN-WA85 experiment for the case of 200A GeV S-A (A∼200) collisions we extract the values of the thermal parameters considering in detail the impact of hadronic resonance decays on the abundances and spectral form of strange baryons and antibaryons. Given these results and invoking further the observed charged particle multiplicities we are able to consider the (specific) entropy content of the fireball in order to understand the nature of the disagreement of the hadronic gas picture of the fireball with the experimental data.