Viewing the Chemical Evolution of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with Charge Balance Functions

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Correlations from charge conservation are affected by when charge/anticharge pairs are created during the course of a relativistic heavy ion collision. For charges created early, balancing charges are typically separated by the order of one unit of spatial rapidity by the end of the collision, whereas those charges produced later in the collision are far more correlated. By analyzing correlations from STAR for different species, I show that one can distinguish the two separate waves of charge creation expected in a high-energy collision, one at early times when the QGP is formed and a second at hadronization. Further, I extract the density of up, down and strange quarks at in the QGP and find agreement at the 20% level with expectations for a chemically thermalized plasma.