Quark Coalescence with Quark Number Conservation and the Effect on Quark-Hadron Scaling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quark coalescence model incorporating quark number conservation, revealing momentum-dependent scaling behaviors and specific effects on charm meson distributions in quark-gluon plasma hadronization.

Contribution

It presents a novel formulation of the quark coalescence model that accounts for quark number conservation, affecting hadronization scaling relations across different momentum regimes.

Findings

Reproduces quadratic and cubic scaling for hard quarks in mesons and baryons.

Predicts linear scaling for dominant hadrons at soft quark momenta.

Shows soft $D$ meson distributions are independent of light quarks, while $J/\psi$ distributions are inversely related.

Abstract

We develop a new formulation of the quark coalescence model by including the quark number conservation in order to describe the hadronization of the bulk of the quark-gluon plasma. The scalings between hadron and quark phase space distributions are shown to depend on the transverse momentum. For hard quarks, our general scalings reproduce the usual quadratic scaling relation for mesons and the cubic scaling relation for baryons. For softer quarks, however, the inclusion of the quark number conservation leads to a linear scaling for the hadron species that dominates the quark number of each flavor, while the scalings of non-dominant hadrons depend on the coalescence dynamics. For charm mesons, we find that the distribution of soft $D$ mesons does not depend on the light quark distribution but the distribution of soft $J/\psi$ mesons is inversely correlated to the light quark distribution.