Thermal Flavor Production and Signatures of Deconfinement

Using renormalization group methods we evaluate the thermal strangeness and charm chemical equilibrium relaxation times in the deconfined quark-gluon plasma. We present a reaction model and evaluate the total production rate of strangeness in fixed target Pb-Pb collisions at 10--300 A GeV. We discuss the relevance of our results to the diagnosis and understanding of the properties of the deconfined state.