Strangeness Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions: Color Ropes or Hydrodynamic Evolution?
We investigate strangeness production and transverse dynamics in heavy-ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}\approx 2.5-20~\mathrm{GeV}$ using the transport approach SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons), its extension with rope hadronization, and the SMASH+vHLLE hybrid approach. Results from the Pythia-based heavy-ion model Angantyr, with and without rope hadronization, are included for comparison. We study midrapidity particle yields and average transverse masses as functions of the number of wounded nucleons, as well as their energy dependence. For the $K^+/π^+$ ratio, SMASH+vHLLE overpredicts strangeness production at low energies but describes the higher-energy behavior reasonably well. SMASH+Ropes reproduces the ratio up to $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}\sim 10~\mathrm{GeV}$ but does not capture the turnover at higher energies. In contrast, the transverse-mass observables favor the hybrid approach, while the non-thermal models considered here do not generate sufficient collective transverse expansion. These results show that strangeness enhancement alone does not uniquely distinguish microscopic string interactions from a locally equilibrated medium. Simultaneously constraining strangeness production and transverse dynamics is therefore essential for disentangling thermal and non-thermal mechanisms in heavy-ion collisions.