Hadron production in heavy ion collisions: Fragmentation and recombination from a dense parton phase
Abstract
We discuss hadron production in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. We argue that hadrons at transverse momenta PT < 5 GeV are formed by recombination of partons from the dense parton phase created in central collisions at RHIC. We provide a theoretical description of the recombination process for PT > 2 GeV. Below PT = 2 GeV our results smoothly match a purely statistical description. At high transverse momentum hadron production is well described in the language of perturbative QCD by the fragmentation of partons. We give numerical results for a variety of hadron spectra, ratios and nuclear suppression factors. We also discuss the anisotropic flow v2 and give results based on a flow in the parton phase. Our results are consistent with the existence of a parton phase at RHIC hadronizing at a temperature of 175 MeV and a radial flow velocity of 0.55c.
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