Baryon enhancement in high-density QCD and relativistic heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We argue that the collinear factorization of the fragmentation functions in high energy nuclear collisions breaks down at transverse momenta $p_T \lesssim Q_s/g$ due to high parton densities in the colliding hadrons and/or nuclei. We find that gluon recombination dominates in that $p_T$ region. We calculate the inclusive cross-section for $\pi$ meson and nucleon production using the low energy theorems for the scale anomaly in QCD, and compare our quantitative baryon-to-meson ratio to the RHIC data.