Hadronization in heavy ion collisions: recombination or fragmentation?
Abstract
We show that hadron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions at transverse momenta larger than 2 GeV/c can be explained by the competition of two different hadronization mechanisms. Above 5 GeV/c hadron production can be described by fragmentation of partons that are created perturbatively. Below 5 GeV/c recombination of partons from the dense and hot fireball dominates. This can explain some of the surprising features of RHIC data like the constant baryon-to-meson ratio of about one and the small nuclear suppression for baryons between 2 to 4 GeV/c.
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