Production characteristics of light (anti-)nuclei from (anti-)nucleon coalescence in heavy ion collisions at energies employed at the RHIC beam energy scan

• Published in: arXiv.org 2022-01
• Main Authors: Xiang-Yu, Zhao, Yan-Ting, Feng, Feng-Lan, Shao, Rui-Qin, Wang, Song, Jun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antinucleons; Coalescing; Deuterons; Heavy ions; Ionic collisions; Light; Nuclei; Nucleons; Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider; Transverse momentum; Tritons
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2201.10354

With the kinetic freeze-out nucleons and antinucleons obtained from the quark combination model, we study the production of light nuclei and antinuclei in the (anti-)nucleon coalescence mechanism in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We derive analytic formulas of the momentum distributions of different light nuclei and apply them to compute transverse momentum (\(p_T\)) spectra of (anti-)deuterons (\(d\), \(\bar d\)) and (anti-)tritons (\(t\), \(\bar t\)) in Au-Au collisions at \(\sqrt{s_{NN}}=\)7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 54.4 GeV. We find that the experimental data available for these \(p_T\) spectra can be well reproduced. We further study the yields and yield ratios of different light (anti-)nuclei and naturally explain their interesting behaviors as a function of the collision energy. We especially point out that the multi-particle yield ratio \(tp/d^2\) should be carefully corrected from hyperon weak decays for protons to probe the production characteristics of light nuclei. All of our results show that the coalescence mechanism for (anti-)nucleons plays a dominant role for the production of light nuclei and antinuclei at the RHIC beam energy scan energies.