Spectra of produced particles at CERN SPS heavy-ion collisions from a parton-cascade model

We evaluate the spectra of produced particles (pions, kaons, antiprotons) from partonic cascades which may develop in the wake of heavy-ion collisions at CERN SPS energies and which may hadronize by formation of clusters which decay into hadrons. Using the experimental data obtained by NA35 and NA44 collaborations for S+S and Pb+Pb collisions, we conclude that the Monte Carlo implementation of the recently developed parton-cascade/cluster-hadronization model provides a reasonable description of the distributions of the particles produced in such collisions. While the rapidity distribution of the mid-rapidity protons is described reasonably well, their transverse momentum distribution falls too rapidly compared to the experimental values, implying a significant effect of final state scattering among the produced hadrons neglected so far

Effective field theory approach to parton-hadron conversion in high energy QCD processes

A QCD based effective action is constructed to describe the dynamics of confinement and symmetry breaking in the process of parton-hadron conversion. The deconfined quark and gluon degrees of freedom of the perturbative QCD vacuum are coupled to color singlet collective fields representing the non-perturbative vacuum with broken scale and chiral symmetry. The effective action recovers QCD with its scale and chiral symmetry properties at short space-time distances, but yields at large distances (r > 1 fm) to the formation of symmetry breaking gluon and quark condensates. The approach is applied to the evolution of a fragmenting q\bar q pair with its generated gluon distribution, starting from a large hard scale Q^2. The modification of the gluon distribution arising from the coupling to the non-perturbative collective field results eventually in a complete condensation of gluons. Color flux tube configurations of the gluons in between the q\bar q pair are obtained as solutions of the equations of motion. With reasonable parameter choice, the associated energy per unit length (string tension) comes out \simeq 1 GeV/fm, consistent with common estimates

Why "Anomalous" J/ψJ/\psi Suppression in Pb+PbPb + Pb Collisions Signals High-density Parton Matter

We argue that the A-dependence of absorption of J/\psi by (partonic) comovers is steeper than assumed in most phenomenological models, because the absorption process is dominated by quasi-perturbative QCD interactions. Our argument is supported by results recently obtained in the framework of the parton cascade model. We predict significant ``anomalous'' suppression for Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN-SPS, but not for S+U collisions