Medium effects on freeze-out of light clusters at NICA energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how medium effects influence the chemical freeze-out of light nuclear clusters at NICA energies, highlighting discrepancies between low and high energy models and emphasizing the need for detailed studies.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of medium effects on light cluster freeze-out at NICA energies, bridging low and high energy models to identify discrepancies.

Findings

Medium effects significantly impact deuteron/proton ratios.

Discrepancies between models suggest importance of medium effects at NICA energies.

Extrapolated models differ by a factor of about three for certain ratios.

Abstract

We estimate the chemical freeze-out of light nuclear clusters for NICA energies of above 2 A GeV. On the one hand we use results from the low energy domain of about 35 A MeV, where medium effects have been shown to be important to explain experimental results. On the high energy side of LHC energies the statistical model without medium effects has provided results for the chemical freeze-out. The two approaches extrapolated to NICA energies show a discrepancy that can be attributed to medium effects and that for the deuteron/proton ratio amounts to a factor of about three. These findings underline the importance of a detailed investigation of light cluster production at NICA energies.