Hypertriton production in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV

Abstract

The study of nuclei and antinuclei production has proven to be a powerful tool to investigate the formation mechanism of loosely bound states in high-energy hadronic collisions. The first measurement of the production of ${}_{\mathrm{\Lambda }}^3\mathrm{H}$ in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV is presented in this Letter. Its production yield measured in the rapidity interval $-1<y<0$ for the 40% highest multiplicity p-Pb collisions is $\mathrm{d}N/\mathrm{d}y=[6.3\pm 1.8(stat.)\pm 1.2(syst.)]\times 10^{-7}$. The measurement is compared with the expectations of statistical hadronisation and coalescence models, which describe the nucleosynthesis in hadronic collisions. These two models predict very different yields of the hypertriton in charged particle multiplicity environments relevant to small collision systems such as p-Pb and therefore the measurement of $\mathrm{d}N/\mathrm{d}y$ is crucial to distinguish between them. The precision of this measurement leads to the exclusion with a significance larger than 6.9$\sigma$ of some configurations of the statistical hadronization model, thus constraining the theory behind the production of loosely bound states at hadron colliders.

19 pages, 3 captioned figures, authors from page 13, published version, figures at http://alice-publications.web.cern.ch/node/7223

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Enhanced deuteron coalescence probability in jets
• Measurements of chemical potentials in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV
• Light nuclei production in pp and pA collisions in the Baryon Canonical Ensemble
• Measurement of ${}_{\Lambda }^3\mathrm{H}$ production in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV
• Observational Probes of the Neutron Star Equation of State with Hyperons, Bosonic Dark Matter, and Quark Matter
• Measurement of the low-energy antitriton inelastic cross section
• Rapidity dependence of antideuteron coalescence in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with ALICE
• Production of loosely-bound hadron molecules from bottomonium decays
• Measurement of the production of (anti)(hyper)nuclei
• A Data-Guided Coalescence Model for Light Nuclei and Hypernuclei Production in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=3$--200 GeV
• 4-momentum conservation as the principal framework for mesonic decay: The case of helium-5-lambda