The phi meson is an interesting probe to study strangeness enhancement, medium effects and the baryon-meson anomaly in Au+Au collisions at RHIC. The ss-bar structure makes the phi meson sensitive to the strangeness production in hot and dense matter. In relativistic heavy ion collisions, as the chiral symmetry restoration is approached, the medium induced effects may modify the phi mass centroid and/or width. This may also lead to a difference in phi yields in between the K+K- and e+e- decay channels.
Since the mass of the phi meson is close to that of a proton, it is also a powerful tool to address the issues related to suppression of the mesons(pions) and non-suppression of baryons (protons) in hot partonic matter.
We shall present and discuss the preliminary results on the phi meson production in both K+K- and e+e- decay channels measured by the PHENIX spectrometer in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV.