Universal quark-jet fragmentation in soft hadronic reactions

We present a parton model describing all the parts of nondiffractive small-$p_{\perp }$ particle production on the basis of (i) quantum-chromodynamics inspired multijet view, (ii) universality of quark-jet hadronization, and (iii) correspondence arguments to dual Regge models. The model reproduces well, without any adjustable parameters, experimental data on average multiplicities and meson distributions in the fragmentation region of mesons and in $\overline{p}p$ annihilation. We argue that the quark-recombination mechanism of Das and Hwa is incorporated in our model in the form of a nonvanishing quark decay function $D\left(z\right)\mathrm{}$ at $z\to 1$. A new test of the multijet point of view is also proposed.