Studying Diquark Structure of Heavy Baryons in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper suggests that the presence of diquarks in the quark-gluon plasma can significantly increase the production of Lambda_c baryons in heavy ion collisions, serving as a potential signal for diquark existence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for Lambda_c enhancement via diquark-quark coalescence, providing a new way to probe diquark states in quark-gluon plasma.

Findings

Lambda_c/D ratio is substantially increased with diquark contribution.

Two-body diquark-quark collisions significantly boost Lambda_c yield.

Diquark presence could serve as a signal for strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

We propose the enhancement of $\Lambda_c$ yield in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC as a novel signal for the existence of diquarks in the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma produced in these collisions as well as in the $\Lambda_c$. Assuming that stable bound diquarks can exist in the quark-gluon plasma, we argue that the yield of $\Lambda_c$ would be increased by two-body collisions between $ud$ diquarks and $c$ quarks, in addition to normal three-body collisions among $u$, $d$ and $c$ quarks. A quantitative study of this effect based on the coalescence model shows that including the contribution of diquarks to $\Lambda_c$ production indeed leads to a substantial enhancement of the $\Lambda_c/D$ ratio in heavy ion collisions.