Dynamical mechanisms for deuteron production at mid-rapidity in relativistic heavy-ion collisions from SIS to RHIC energies

Abstract

The understanding of the mechanisms for the production of weakly bound clusters, such as a deuteron $d$, in heavy-ion reactions at mid-rapidity is presently one of the challenging problems which is also known as the "ice in a fire" puzzle. In this study we investigate the dynamical formation of deuterons within the Parton-Hadron-Quantum-Molecular Dynamics (PHQMD) microscopic transport approach and advance two microscopic production mechanisms to describe deuterons in heavy-ion collisions from SIS to RHIC energies: kinetic production by hadronic reactions and potential production by the attractive potential between nucleons. Differently to other studies, for the "kinetic" deuterons we employ the full isospin decomposition of the various $\pi NN\leftrightarrow \pi d$, $NNN\leftrightarrow Nd$ channels and take into account the finite size properties of the deuteron by means of an excluded volume condition in coordinate space and by the projection onto the deuteron wave function in momentum space. We find that considering the quantum nature of the deuteron in coordinate and momentum space reduces substantially the kinetic deuteron production in a dense medium as encountered in heavy-ion collisions. If we add the "potential" deuterons by applying an advanced Minimum Spanning Tree (aMST) procedure, we obtain good agreement with the available experimental data from SIS energies up to the top RHIC energy.

35 pages, 24 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Flow and Equation of State of nuclear matter at ${\mathbf{E}}_{\mathrm{kin}}$/A=0.25-1.5 GeV with the SMASH transport approach
• Cluster formation near midrapidity -- can the mechanism be identified experimentally?
• A Poincaré covariant cascade method for high-energy nuclear collisions
• Momentum correlation of light nuclei in Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.0 $\sim$ 7.7 GeV
• Dynamics of dilute nuclear matter with light clusters and in-medium effects
• Elliptic flow of deuterons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Kaon-deuteron femtoscopy from unitarized chiral interactions
• Phase-space excluded-volume approach for light clusters in nuclear medium
• Probing of EoS with clusters and hypernuclei
• Alpha clustering in warm and dense nuclear matter from heavy-ion collisions