Parton coalescence and spacetime.pdf

a r X i v : n u c l - t h / 0 4 0 6 0 6 6 v 1 1 9 J u n 2 0 0 4 Acta Phys. Hung. A 19/1 (2004) 000–000 HEAVY ION PHYSICS Parton coalescence and spacetime De?nes Molna?r1 1 Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Received February 8, 2008 Abstract. The influence of spacetime dynamics in hadronization via parton coalescence at RHIC is investigated using covariant parton transport theory. Key observables, the quark number scaling of elliptic flow and the enhancement of the p/π ratio, show strong dynamical effects and differ from earlier results based on the simple coalescence formulas. Keywords: Relativistic heavy-ion collisions, Hadronization, Quark coalescence PACS: 12.38.Mh; 24.85.+p; 25.75.Gz; 25.75.-q 1. Introduction Recent exciting puzzles in Au + Au reactions at √ sNN = 130 and 200 GeV at RHIC are the quark number scaling of elliptic flow[ 1, 2, 3] and the weaker baryon suppression than that of mesons in the intermediate transverse momentum region 2 p⊥ 5 GeV [ 1, 2, 4, 5]. Parton coalescence[ 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] is probably the most promising proposal at present to explain both phenomena. In the coalescence model, mesons form from a quark and antiquark, while baryons from three quarks or three antiquarks. The simplest version of the model is based on the “coalescence formula” (Eq. (1), or minor variation of it) that gives the hadron spectra in terms of the constituent phasespace distributions on a 3D space- time hypersurface. Remarkably, this simple approach can reproduce quite well the particle spectra at RHIC[ 8, 9] and can explain the scaling of elliptic flow v2(p⊥) with constituent number[ 10, 11]. Furthermore, the parameterizations of the con- stituent distributions and the hypersurface are consistent with hadronization from a thermalized quark-antiquark plasma at RHIC. Nevertheless, these earlier studies left several important questions open. For example, it is known[ 10, 11] that the coalescence formula vio