2006/06/09 by M. Heinz, Mark Heinz, Heinz, Mark
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ex/0606020
8 pages, Conference Proceedings for 22nd Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, San Diego CA, March 11-19, 2006
arxiv created 2006/06/09 · openalex publication_date 2006/06/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
STAR has measured a variety of strange particle species in p+p collisions at √(s)=200 GeV. These high statistics data are ideal for comparing to existing leading- and next-to-leading order perturbative QCD (pQCD) models. Leading-order (LO) models such as PYTHIA need to be tuned to describe identified strange particle data from STAR. We show that tuned PYTHIA can also describe the pt-spectra of strange resonances. More rigorous Next-to-Leading order pQCD calculations using parameterized fragmentation functions for quarks and gluons will also be compared to STAR data. The OPAL experiment has recently released e+e- data from light quark flavor tagged analyses allowing for the first time to make precise parameterizations of light flavor separated fragmentation function. We show that our Lambda data put a more stringent constraint on the gluon fragmentation function than e+e- data. Furthermore we show that pQCD fails to describe the observed enhancement of baryon-to-meson ratio at intermediate pt (2-6 GeV/c), which may be a first indication of other, non-perturbative mechanisms at play in p+p collisions at that momentum.