  The NA52 collaboration searches for a discontinuous behaviour of charged
kaons produced in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV as a function of the impact
parameter, which could reveal a hadron to quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase
transition. The K+ yield is found to grow proportional to the number of
participating ('wounded') nucleons N, above N=100. Previous NA52 data agree
with the above finding and show a discontinuous behaviour in the kaon
centrality dependence near N=100, marking the onset of strangeness enhancement
-over e.g. p+A data at the same \sqrt{s}- in a chemically equilibrated phase.

High Energy Physics - Experiment