Wounded quarks and diquarks in heavy ion collisions

A model in which the soft collisions of the nucleon are described in terms of interactions of its two constituents (a quark and a diquark) is proposed. When adjusted to describe precisely the elastic proton-proton scattering data and supplemented with the idea of wounded constituents, the model accounts rather well for the centrality dependence of particle production in the central rapidity region at RHIC energies.