Quark Coalescence with Quark Number Conservation and the Effect on Quark-Hadron Scaling

Abstract

We develop a new formulation of the quark coalescence model by including the quark number conservation in order to describe the hadronization of the bulk of the quark-gluon plasma. The scalings between hadron and quark phase space distributions are shown to depend on the transverse momentum. For hard quarks, our general scalings reproduce the usual quadratic scaling relation for mesons and the cubic scaling relation for baryons. For softer quarks, however, the inclusion of the quark number conservation leads to a linear scaling for the hadron species that dominates the quark number of each flavor, while the scalings of non-dominant hadrons depend on the coalescence dynamics. For charm mesons, we find that the distribution of soft $D$ mesons does not depend on the light quark distribution but the distribution of soft $J/\psi$ mesons is inversely correlated to the light quark distribution.