Quark-gluon strings fragment into mesons and baryons
Hadronization is the nonperturbative QCD process by which quarks and gluons produced in high-energy collisions convert into observable hadrons. The Lund string model (Andersson et al. 1983) describes this as a relativistic string with linear tension σ ≈ 1 GeV/fm that repeatedly breaks by producing quark-antiquark pairs from the vacuum, creating chains of mesons. The multiplicity grows logarithmically with energy: ⟨n⟩ ~ ln(s/Λ²).