Parton coalescence at RHIC

Using a covariant coalescence model, we study hadron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions from both soft partons in the quark-gluon plasma and hard partons in minijets. Including transverse flow of soft partons and independent fragmentation of minijet partons, the model is able to describe available experimental data on pion, kaon, and antiproton spectra. The resulting antiproton to pion ratio is seen to increase at low transverse momenta and reaches a value of about one at intermediate transverse momenta, as observed in experimental data at RHIC. A similar dependence of the antikaon to pion ratio on transverse momentum is obtained, but it reaches a smaller value at intermediate transverse momenta. At high transverse momenta, the model predicts that both the antiproton to pion and the antikaon to pion ratio decrease and approach those given by the perturbative QCD. Both collective flow effect and coalescence of minijet partons with partons in the quark-gluon plasma affect significantly the spectra of hadrons with intermediate transverse momenta. Elliptic flows of protons, Lambdas, and Omegas have also been evaluated from partons with elliptic flows extracted from fitting measured pion and kaon elliptic flows, and they are found to be consistent with available experimental data.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

New results from NA49

Recent results of the NA49 experiment are presented. These cover first results on pion and kaon production, HBT, and charge fluctuations from Pb+Pb reactions at 40A GeV and their comparison to 158A GeV beam energy. Furthermore a study on baryon number transfer in p+p, centrality selected p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions at 158A GeV and new results on the system size dependence of kaon yields, including C+C and Si+Si data, are presented. Additionally, a first result on $\Lambda$ $\Lambda$ correlations is shown