Deuteron production and elliptic flow in relativistic heavy ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper extends a hadronic transport model to include deuteron production and annihilation, then uses it to analyze deuteron spectra and flow in relativistic heavy ion collisions, comparing results with experimental data.

Contribution

The study introduces a new extension of the ART transport model to simulate deuteron dynamics and compares its predictions with experimental measurements and coalescence models.

Findings

Deuteron spectra and elliptic flow are well reproduced by the extended model.

The model shows consistency with experimental data from PHENIX and STAR.

Results support the coalescence mechanism for deuteron formation.

Abstract

The hadronic transport model \textsc{art} is extended to include the production and annihilation of deuterons via the reactions $BB \leftrightarrow dM$, where $B$ and $M$ stand for baryons and mesons, respectively, as well as their elastic scattering with mesons and baryons in the hadronic matter. This new hadronic transport model is then used to study the transverse momentum spectrum and elliptic flow of deuterons in relativistic heavy ion collisions, with the initial hadron distributions after hadronization of produced quark-gluon plasma taken from a blast wave model. The results are compared with those measured by the PHENIX and STAR Collaborations for Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}^{}} = 200$ GeV, and also with those obtained from the coalescence model based on freeze-out nucleons in the transport model.