Jet Fragmentation via Recombination of Parton Showers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid hadronization model combining quark recombination and string fragmentation, applied to QCD jets, which aligns well with traditional PYTHIA results and enables studying jets in quark-gluon plasma environments.

Contribution

A novel hybrid hadronization approach integrating quark recombination with string fragmentation for QCD jets.

Findings

Final hadron spectra agree with PYTHIA's Lund string fragmentation.

Method allows for potential extension to jets in quark-gluon plasma.

Hybrid model effectively reproduces known jet fragmentation results.

Abstract

We propose to model hadronization of parton showers in QCD jets through a hybrid approach involving quark recombination and string fragmentation. This is achieved by allowing gluons at the end of the perturbative shower evolution to undergo a non-perturbative splitting into quark and antiquark pairs, then applying a Monte-Carlo version of instantaneous quark recombination, and finally subjecting remnant quarks (those which have not found a recombination partner) to Lund string fragmentation. When applied to parton showers from the PYTHIA Monte Carlo event generator, the final hadron spectra from our calculation compare quite well to PYTHIA jets that have been hadronized with the default Lund string fragmentation. Our new approach opens up the possibility to generalize hadronization to jets embedded in a quark gluon plasma.