Suppression of high transverse momentum hadrons at RHIC by (pre-) hadronic final state interactions Original Research Article

We investigate transverse hadron spectra from proton + proton, deuteron + Au and Au+Au collisions at View the MathML source and View the MathML source within the Hadron–String Dynamics (HSD) approach which is based on quark, diquark, string and hadronic degrees of freedom as well as Pythia calculations for the high-p⊥ spectra. The comparison to experimental data on transverse mass spectra from p+p, d+Au and Au+Au reactions shows that pre-hadronic effects are responsible for both the hardening of the spectra for low transverse momenta (Cronin effect) as well as the suppression of high-p⊥ hadrons. The interactions of formed hadrons are found to be negligible in central Au+Au collisions at View the MathML source for p⊥⩾6 GeV/c, but have some importance for the shape of the ratio RAA at lower p⊥ values (⩽6 GeV/c). The large suppression seen experimentally is attributed to the inelastic interactions of ‘leading’ pre-hadrons with the dense environment, which could be partly of colored partonic nature in order to explain the large attenuation seen in most central Au+Au collisions.