Salient Features of Hadronization, Deconfinement and Heavy Quark Probes at RHIC

Abstract

We present experimental features of identified particle production from nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC. These features reflect hadronization from a deconfined partonic matter whose particle formation scheme is distinctly different from fragmentation phenomenology in elementary collisions. Multi-parton dynamics, such as quark coalescences or recombinations, appear to be essential to explain the experimental measurements at the intermediate transverse momentum of 2-5 GeV/c. Constituent quarks seem to be the dominant degrees of freedom at hadronization and gluon degrees of freedom are not explicitly manifested in the hadronization scheme. This physical scenario is consistent with recent Lattice QCD calculations that near the critical temperature hadrons do not melt completely and quasi-particles may provide an effective degrees of freedom to describe the partonic matter. Heavy quark production and other future experimental measurements to quantify the QCD properties of the produced matter at RHIC will be discussed.