A topological model for baryon production in jets

We present a conceptual model for baryon production in jets, inspired by the Skyrme picture of baryons as topological defects in a chiral quark-antiquark condensate. High energy collisions produce ''hot'' partons which split perturbatively into showers of ''cool'' partons which hadronize non-perturbatively. We visualize each of these as corresponding to a connected domain with a common orientation of the chiral condensate. Topological defects, namely baryons, are formed when there are mismatches in the orientations of adjacent field domains, rather as cosmic strings or monopoles are formed in the early Universe. Our model gives a good qualitative description of various salient features of baryon production in jets, which previously could be described only with a large number of free parameters. In particular, we give a qualitative explanation of the high baryon production rate in Υ decays compared to the e+e- continuum. When combined with a perturbative QCD parton shower Monte Carlo it could become a basis for a fully-fledged fragmentation model. (orig.)