Suppression of light nuclei production in collisions of small systems at the Large Hadron Collider

We show that the recently observed suppression of the yield ratio of deuteron to proton and of helium-3 to proton in p+p collisions compared to those in p+Pb or Pb+Pb collisions by the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be explained if light nuclei are produced from the coale...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physics letters. B 2019-05, Vol.792 (C), p.132-137
Main Authors: Sun, Kai-Jia, Ko, Che Ming, Dönigus, Benjamin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We show that the recently observed suppression of the yield ratio of deuteron to proton and of helium-3 to proton in p+p collisions compared to those in p+Pb or Pb+Pb collisions by the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be explained if light nuclei are produced from the coalescence of nucleons at the kinetic freeze-out of these collisions. This suppression is attributed to the non-negligible sizes of deuteron and helium-3 compared to the size of the nucleon emission source in collisions of small systems, which reduces the overlap of their internal wave functions with those of nucleons. The same model is also used to study the production of triton and hypertriton in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. Compared to helium-3 in events of low charged particle multiplicity, the triton is less suppressed due to its smaller size and the hypertriton is even more suppressed as a result of its much larger size.
ISSN:0370-2693
1873-2445
DOI:10.1016/j.physletb.2019.03.033