Recombination of shower partons in fragmentation processes

Abstract

We develop the notion of shower partons and determine their distributions in jets in the framework of the recombination model. The shower parton distributions obtained render a good fit of the fragmentation functions. We then illustrate the usefulness of the distributions in a problem where a jet is produced in the environment of thermal partons as in heavy-ion collisions. The recombination of shower and thermal partons is shown to be more important than fragmentation. Application to the study of two-particle correlation in a jet is also carried out.