  Charge balance functions, which identify balancing particle-antiparticle
pairs on a statistical basis, have been shown to be sensitive to whether
hadronization is delayed by several fm/c in relativistic heavy ion collisions.
Results from two classes of models are presented here, microscopic hadronic
models and thermal models. The microscopic models give results which are
contrary to recently published pi+pi- balance functions from the STAR
collaboration, whereas the thermal model roughly reproduce the experimental
results. This suggests that charge conservation is local at breakup, which is
in line with expectations for a delayed hadronization. Predictions are also
presented for balance functions binned as a function of Q_inv.
