Dynamics and hadronization at intermediate transverse momentum at RHIC

The ultra-relativistic heavy-ion program at RHIC has shown that at intermediate transverse momenta (pT ≃ 2-6 GeV) standard (independent) parton fragmentation can neither describe the observed baryon-to-meson ratios nor the empirical scaling of the hadronic elliptic flow (v2) according to the number of valence quarks. Both aspects find instead a natural explanation in a coalescence plus fragmentation approach to hadronization. After a brief review of the main results for light quarks, we focus on heavy quarks showing that a combined fragmentation and quark-coalescence framework is relevant also here. Moreover, within relativistic Langevin simulations we find evidence for the importance of heavy-light resonances in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) to explain the strong energy loss and collective flow of heavy-quark spectra as inferred from non-photonic electron observables. Such heavy-light resonances can pave the way to a unified understanding of the microscopic structure of the QGP and its subsequent hadronization by coalescence.