https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-020-00198-6
Regular Article -Theoretical Physics
Production of
and
correlation function in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
1
Institute of Physics, Jan Kochanowski University, Ul. Uniwersytecka 7, 25-406, Kielce, Poland
2
National Centre for Nuclear Research, Ul. Pasteura 7, 02-093, Warsaw, Poland
* e-mail: stanislaw.mrowczynski@ncbj.gov.pl
Received:
10
February
2020
Accepted:
14
July
2020
Published online:
28
July
2020
The thermal and coalescence models both describe well yields of light nuclei produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at LHC. We propose to measure the yield of and compare it to that of
to falsify one of the models. Since the masses of
and
are almost equal, the yield of
is about 5 times bigger than that of
in the thermal model because of different numbers of spin states of the two nuclides. Their internal structures are, however, very different: the alpha particle is well bound and compact while
is weakly bound and loose. Consequently, the ratio of yields of
to
is significantly smaller in the coalescence model and it strongly depends on the collision centrality. Since the nuclide
is unstable and it decays into
and p, the yield of
can be experimentally obtained through a measurement of the
correlation function. The function carries information not only about the yield of
but also about the source of
and allows one to determine through a source-size measurement whether of
is directly emitted from the fireball or it is formed afterwards. We compute the correlation function taking into account the s-wave scattering and Coulomb repulsion together with the resonance interaction responsible for the
nuclide. We discuss how to infer information about an origin of
from the correlation function, and finally a method to obtain the yield of
is proposed.
© The Author(s), 2020