Anomalous baryon production in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies

Abstract

In ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions the baryon-meson ratio is not fully understood in the intermediate-to-high transverse momentum region. Although quark coalescence methods combined with jet fragmentation yield results close to the experimental data, some tendencies are not reproduced and require further investigation. We propose a new channel, namely extra quark-antiquark and diquark-antidiquark pair production from coherent gluon field created in the early stage of heavy ion collisions. This process is described quantitatively by the time-dependent Schwinger-mechanism. The extra diquark-quark coalescence yields are able to explain the measured anomalous baryon production.

Comments: 7 pages, 9 figures