Centrality dependence of pseudorapidity distributions of baryons in heavy ion collisions at RHIC

The energy and centrality independence of the limiting fragmentation for produced mesons have been used to extract the reduced pseudorapidity (η′ = η − η _beam ) distributions of charged baryons at forward rapidity. The distribution crosses at η′ ≈ = −1 suggesting the prominence of beam protons above that rapidity. The loss of beam rapidity has been extracted which has been found to increase with centrality.