Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 95
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3319-7

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

A heuristic description of high- hadron production in heavy ion collisions

¹ Czech Technical University in Prague, FNSPE, Břehová 7, 11519, Prague, Czech Republic
² Institute of Experimental Physics SAS, Watsonova 47, 04001, Košice, Slovakia
³ Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics, Lund University, 223 62, Lund, Sweden
⁴ Departamento de Física, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso, Chile
⁵ Centro Científico-Tecnológico de Valparaíso, Casilla 110-V, Valparaíso, Chile

^* e-mail: Roman.Pasechnik@thep.lu.se

Received: 10 July 2014
Accepted: 12 February 2015
Published online: 27 February 2015

Abstract

Using a simplified model for in-medium dipole evolution accounting for color filtering effects we study the production of hadrons at large transverse momenta in heavy ion collisions. In the framework of this model, several important sources of the nuclear suppression observed recently at RHIC and LHC have been analyzed. A short production length of the leading hadron causes a strong onset of color transparency effects, manifesting themselves as a steep rise of the nuclear modification factor at large hadron . The dominance of quarks with higher leads to a weaker suppression at RHIC than the one observed at LHC. In the RHIC kinematic region we include an additional suppression factor, steeply falling with , which is tightly related to the energy conservation constraints. This is irrelevant at LHC up to , while it causes a rather flat dependence of the factor at RHIC c.m. energy and even an increasing suppression with at The calculations contain only a medium density adjustment, and for an initial time scale = 1  we found the energy-dependent maximal values of the transport coefficient, , and , corresponding to , and , respectively. We present a broad variety of predictions for the nuclear modification factor and the azimuthal asymmetry, which are well in agreement with available data from experiments at RHIC and LHC.