Exploring the strong interaction of three-body systems at the LHC

Abstract

Deuterons are atomic nuclei composed of a neutron and a proton held together by the strong interaction. Unbound ensembles composed of a deuteron and a third nucleon have been investigated in the past using scattering experiments and they constitute a fundamental reference in nuclear physics to constrain nuclear interactions and the properties of nuclei. In this work, K${}^{+}-$d and p$-$d femtoscopic correlations measured by the ALICE Collaboration in proton$-$proton (pp) collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented. It is demonstrated that correlations in momentum space between deuterons and kaons or protons allow us to study three-hadron systems at distances comparable with the proton radius. The analysis of the K${}^{+}-$d correlation shows that the relative distances at which deuterons and protons or kaons are produced are around 2 fm. The analysis of the p$-$d correlation shows that only a full three-body calculation that accounts for the internal structure of the deuteron can explain the data. In particular, the sensitivity of the observable to the short-range part of the interaction is demonstrated. These results indicate that correlations involving light nuclei in pp collisions at the LHC will also provide access to any three-body systems in the strange and charm sectors.

26 pages, 3 captioned figures, 3 tables, authors from page 20, published version figures at http://alice-publications.web.cern.ch/node/9595

References in corpus (2)

• Three-body forces: From cold atoms to nuclei
• Measurement of deuteron spectra and elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{{\mathbf{s}}_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV at the LHC

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Accessing the deuteron source with pion-deuteron femtoscopy in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV
• Theoretical study on $\Lambda \alpha$ and $\Xi \alpha$ correlation functions
• Toward a Unified Understanding of the Dense Matter Equation of State
• Correlation function for the $n{\bar{D}}_{s0}^{\ast }(2317)$ interaction and the issue of elastic unitarity
• $\Xi NN$ three-baryon force from SU(3) chiral effective field theory: A femtoscopic study