Correlated Emission of Hadrons from Recombination of Correlated Partons

We discuss different sources of hadron correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We show that correlations among partons in a quasithermal medium can lead to the correlated emission of hadrons by quark recombination and argue that this mechanism offers a plausible explanation for the dihadron correlations in the few $\mathrm{GeV}/c$ momentum range observed in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Figure 1

Schematic pictures of the processes F-F, F-SH and SS-SS for producing two mesons $A$, $B$. Thick lines are medium quarks. Possible correlations are indicated by curly lines.

Figure 2

$Y_{AB}^{\mathrm{cone}}={\int }_0^{0.94}d(\Delta \varphi )Y_{AB}(\Delta \varphi )$ for meson (left panel) and baryon triggers (right panel) as a function of centrality. “Soft“ means contributions from SS-SS and SS-SSS for meson triggers and from SSS-SS and SSS-SSS for baryon triggers. Data shown is from PHENIX [9] with statistical errors only. Inset: Associated yield as a function of $\Delta \varphi$ before background subtraction at impact parameter $b=8\mathrm{fm}$.