https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01673-1
Regular Article
Deuteron production and elliptic flow in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
1
Fakulta jaderná a fyzikálně inženýrská, České vysoké učení technické v Praze, Břehová 7, 11519, Praha 1, Czech Republic
2
Fakulta prírodných vied, Univerzita Mateja Bela, Tajovského 40, 97401, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia
Received:
26
November
2024
Accepted:
28
April
2025
Published online:
21
May
2025
We explore the idea that differential elliptic flow of deuterons may be a sensitive probe of the production mechanism of nuclear clusters, which can discriminate between direct thermal production and coalescence. The important difference is that thermal production does not take into account the size of the deuteron while coalescence explicitly depends on the comparison of deuteron wave function width with the size of the emitting region within the fireball. In order to check and illustrate our idea, we simulate the differential elliptic flow of deuterons in collisions of Pb+Pb nuclei at a collision energy of 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon pair, and compare it to experimental data. While results obtained from a Monte Carlo model based on a blast-wave parametrisation indicate difference between thermal production and coalescence, simulations with advanced hybrid model lead to indistinguishable predictions.
© The Author(s) 2025
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