Improved Quark Coalescence for a Multi-Phase Transport Model

Understand

The string melting version of a multi-phase transport model is often applied to high-energy heavy-ion collisions since the dense matter thus formed is expected to be in parton degrees of freedom.

• In this work we improve its quark coalescence component, which describes the hadronization of the partonic matter to a hadronic matter.
• We removed the previous constraint that forced the numbers of mesons, baryons, and antibaryons in an event to be separately conserved through the quark coalescence process.
• A quark now could form either a meson or a baryon depending on the distance to its coalescence partner(s).