Novel Mechanism of Nucleon Stopping in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

When a diquark does not fragment directly but breaks in such a way that only one of its quarks gets into the produced baryon, the latter is produced closer to mid rapidities. The relative size of this diquark breaking component increases quite fast with increasing energy. We show that at a given energy it also increases with the atomic mass number and with the centrality of the collision and that it allows to explain the rapidity distribution of the net baryon number ($p$-$\bar{p}$) in $SS$ central collisions. Predictions for $Pb$-$Pb$ collisions are presented.