Role of Meson Excited States in Hybrid Hadronization in Electron-Positron Annihilation

Electron-positron (e⁺e⁻) annihilation creates parton showers that eventually create hadrons. The process of the partons turning into hadrons is modeled by Hybrid Hadronization which describes two hadronization processes: fragmentation, which corresponds to mesons or baryons being formed from strings of gluons stretching between quarks and antiquarks, and recombination, which corresponds to quarks close together in phase space hadronizing. Using the JETSCAPE (Jet Energy-loss Tomography with a Statistically and Computationally Advanced Program Envelope) framework, a Monte Carlo simulation, this research analyzed the role of excited states and how their presence or lack thereof affects recombination as a form of hadronization in an e⁺e⁻ collision. This project analyzed the energy spectrum for mesons formed from recombination from the same collision. It further analyzed these energy spectra for varying the quantum numbers J, S, and L, as well for the varying radially excited quantum states in order to study what effect these quantum numbers have on the recombination energy spectra and recombination as a percentage of all hadronization. The results are shown in the poster.