Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Quark Recombination

Rainer Fries

University of Minnesota

High energy nuclear collisions are studied to create a deconfined quark gluon phase and to find out about its properties. Data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider suggest that hadron production at intermediate transverse momenta (a few GeV/c) in such collisions happens through a quark recombination or coalescence process. This result came somewhat unexpected and it allows us to draw some interesting conclusions. I review the the evidence for quark recombination and discuss some recent developments.