Hadronization Approach for a Quark-Gluon Plasma Formed in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

A transport model is developed to describe hadron emission from a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The quark-gluon plasma is controlled by ideal hydrodynamics, and the hadron motion is characterized by a transport equation with loss and gain terms. The two sets of equations are coupled to each other, and the hadronization hypersurface is determined by both the hydrodynamic evolution and the hadron emission. The model is applied to calculate the transverse momentum distributions of mesons and baryons, and most of the results agree well with the experimental data at RHIC.Comment: 16 pages, 24 figures. Version accepted by PR