Role of event multiplicity on hadronic phase lifetime and QCD phase boundary in ultrarelativistic collisions at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper investigates how event multiplicity influences the lifetime of the hadronic phase and the QCD phase boundary in ultrarelativistic collisions at RHIC and LHC energies, using resonance probes and temperature estimates.

Contribution

It provides new estimates of hadronic phase lifetime and QGP phase boundary location across various collision systems and energies, highlighting the multiplicity dependence of hadronic phase duration.

Findings

Hadronic phase lifetime increases with final state multiplicity.

QGP phase boundary shows weak dependence on multiplicity.

Hadronization occurs at similar temperatures across different systems.

Abstract

Hadronic resonances, having very short lifetime, like $\rm{K}^{*0}$, can act as useful probes to understand and estimate lifetime of hadronic phase in ultra-relativistic proton-proton, p--Pb and heavy-ion collisions. Resonances with relatively longer lifetime, like $\phi$ meson, can serve as a tool to locate the QGP phase boundary. We estimate a lower limit of hadronic phase lifetime in Cu--Cu and Au--Au collisions at RHIC, and in pp, p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions at different LHC collision energies. Also, we obtain the effective temperature of $\phi$ meson using Boltzmann-Gibbs Blast-Wave function, which gives an insight to locate the QGP phase boundary. We observe that the hadronic phase lifetime strongly depends on final state charged-particle multiplicity, whereas the QGP phase and hence the QCD phase boundary shows a very weak multiplicity dependence. This suggests that the hadronisation from a QGP state starts at a similar temperature irrespective of charged-particle multiplicity, collision system and collision energy, while the endurance of hadronic phase is strongly dependent on final state charge-particle multiplicity, system size and collision energy.