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Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2689 - 2692 (2000)

Clocking Hadronization in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions with Balance Functions

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Steffen A. Bass, Pawel Danielewicz, and Scott Pratt
Department of Physics and Astronomy and National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824

Received 15 May 2000

A novel state of matter has been hypothesized to exist during the early stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, with normal hadrons not appearing until several fm/c after the start of the reaction. To test this hypothesis, correlations between charges and their associated anticharges are evaluated with the use of balance functions. It is shown that late-stage hadronization is characterized by tightly correlated charge-anticharge pairs when measured as a function of relative rapidity.


©2000 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.2689
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.2689
PACS: 24.85.+p, 25.75.Gz

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