Strange particle production in pp collisions at √s = 0.9 and 7 TeVs

The spectra of strange hadrons are measured in proton-proton collisions, recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 and 7TeV. The K0 ^S, Lambda, and - particles and their antiparticles are reconstructed from their decay topologies and the production rates are measured as functions of rapidity and transverse momentum, p ^T. The results are compared to other experiments and to predictions of the Pythia Monte Carlo program. The p^T distributions are found to differ substantially from the Pythia results and the production rates exceed the predictions by up to a factor of three.