https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01534-4
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Study of the deuterons emission time in pp collisions at the LHC via kaon-deuteron correlations
1
Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, INFN, Frascati, Italy
2
Physics Department, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany
3
Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
a
oton.vazquezdoce@lnf.infn.it
Received:
18
December
2024
Accepted:
2
March
2025
Published online:
17
March
2025
The femtoscopy correlation between positively charged kaons and deuterons measured in pp collisions at 
13 TeV at the LHC with the ALICE experiment is employed to determine the upper limit for the time delay of the deuteron emission in such collisions with respect to all other hadrons. Two scenarios are considered: the first assumes that deuterons form following the decays of short-lived strong resonances, while the second assumes that deuteron production occurs simultaneously with all other primary hadrons. For both scenarios, an additional delay time for deuteron formation can be introduced using the CECA source model and its upper limit can be extracted by fitting the femtoscopy correlation, incorporating models of the final state K
d strong interaction. For the scenario where deuterons production is affected by baryonic resonances the upper limit of the time delay is 2.25 fm/c, while for the primary production scenario the upper limit is 4.75 fm/c. These results align with the hypothesis of an early formation of the deuteron as an extended, weakly bound composite object in ultra-relativistic proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
