2022/07/25 by Kai-Jia Sun, Rui Wang, Sun, Kai-Jia +7
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.12532
openalex publication_date 2022/07/25 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Like nucleosynthesis during the early universe, light nuclei are also produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Although the deuteron (d) yields in these collisions can be well described by the statistical hadronization model (SHM), which assumes that particle yields are fixed at a common chemical freezeout near the phase boundary between the quark-gluon plasma and the hadron gas, the recently measured triton (3H) yields in Au+Au collisions at √sNN=7.7-200 GeV are overestimated systematically by this model. Here, we develop a comprehensive kinetic approach to study the effects of hadronic re-scatterings, such as πNN↔πd and πNNN↔π3H~(3He), on d, 3H, and 3He production in these collisions. We find that these reactions have little effects on the deuteron yield but reduce the 3H and 3He yields by about a factor of 1.8 from their initial values given by the SHM. This finding helps resolve the overestimation of triton production in the SHM and provides the evidence for hadronic re-scattering effects on nucleosynthesis in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.