Formation of hypernuclei in heavy-ion collisions around the threshold energies

TL;DR

This paper explores hypernuclei formation in heavy-ion collisions at energies near the threshold, showing significant hypernuclei production even below typical hyperon creation energies, aiding future experimental efforts.

Contribution

It provides a systematic study of hypernuclei formation at low energies using transport models, highlighting the potential for hypernuclei production below hyperon threshold energies.

Findings

Hypernuclei can form at energies below Lambda hyperon production threshold.

Multi-strange hypernuclei are also produced in these conditions.

Model predictions align with experimental strangeness production data.

Abstract

In relativistic ion collisions there are excellent opportunities to produce and investigate hyper-nuclei. We have systematically studied the formation of hypernuclear spectator residues in peripheral heavy-ion collisions with the transport DCM and UrQMD models. The hyperon capture was calculated within the potential and coalescence approaches. We demonstrate that even at the beam energies around and lower than the threshold for producing Lambda hyperons in binary nucleon-nucleon interactions a considerable amount of hypernuclei, including multi-strange ones, can be produced. This is important for preparation of new experiments on hypernuclei in the wide energy range. The uncertainties of the predictions are investigated within the models, and the comparison with the strangeness production measured in experiments is also performed.