Quark Recombination in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

Data on high energy nuclear collisions collected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider over the past decade have provided convincing evidence that hadronization is quite different in hot nuclear environments compared to p+p collisions. In particular, the data suggest that we see traces of quark degrees of freedom in elliptic flow, with the implication that collective flow is generated on the parton level and is transfered to hadrons through a simple recombination step. In this contribution we review the experimental evidence for quark recombination and discuss some recombination models which are used to describe these effects.