Quantum-mechanical description of in-medium fragmentation

Abstract

We present a quantum-mechanical description of quark-hadron fragmentation in a nuclear environment. It employs the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which takes care of all phases and interferences, and which contains all relevant time scales, like production, coherence, formation, etc. The cross section includes the probability of pre-hadron (colorless dipole) production both inside and outside the medium. Moreover, it also includes inside-outside production, which is a typical quantum-mechanical interference effect (like twin-slit electron propagation). We observe a substantial suppression caused by the medium, even if the pre-hadron is produced outside the medium and no energy loss is involved. This important source of suppression is missed in the usual energy-loss scenario interpreting the effect of jet quenching observed in heavy ion collisions. This may be one of the reasons of a too large gluon density, reported by such analyzes.

20 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Atomic Mass Dependence of Hadron Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering on Nuclei
• Nuclear Broadening of Transverse Momentum in Drell-Yan Reactions
• Jet lag effect and leading hadron production
• Color Transparency at Low Energies: Predictions for JLAB
• Perturbative fragmentation

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Multiple parton interactions and forward double pion production in pp and dA scattering
• Quenching of high-pT hadrons: Energy Loss vs Color Transparency
• Transverse Momentum Broadening in Semi-inclusive DIS on Nuclei
• Experimental Studies of Hadronization and Parton Propagation in the Space-Time Domain
• A heuristic description of high-pT hadron production in heavy ion collisions
• Quenching of high-pT hadrons: a non-energy-loss scenario