Production of Light Nuclei in Heavy Ion Collisions via Hagedorn Resonances

TL;DR

This paper explores the production of light nuclei in heavy ion collisions using a Hagedorn resonance model, demonstrating that a thermalized Hagedorn gas can explain experimental yields and suggesting production at lower temperatures than previously thought.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Hagedorn resonances to unify different production mechanisms of light nuclei in heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Hagedorn decay rates enable calculation of light nuclei yields.

A thermalized Hagedorn gas can reproduce experimental data.

Cooling the system allows light nuclei production at lower temperatures.

Abstract

The physical processes behind the production of light nuclei in heavy ion collisions are unclear. The nice theoretical description of experimental yields by thermal models conflicts with the very small binding energies of the observed states, being fragile in such a hot and dense environment. Other available ideas are delayed production via coalescence, or a cooling of the system after the chemical freeze-out according a Saha equation, or a `quench' instead of a thermal freeze-out. A recently derived prescription of an (interacting) Hagedorn gas is applied to consolidate the above pictures. The tabulation of decay rates of Hagedorn states into light nuclei allows to calculate yields usually unaccessable due to very poor Monte Carlo statistics. Decay yields of stable hadrons and light nuclei are calculated. While the scale-free decays of Hagedorn states alone are not compatible with the experimental data, a thermalized hadron and Hagedorn state gas is able to describe the experimental data. Applying a cooling of the system according a Saha-equation with conservation of nucleons and anti-nucleons in number leads to (nearly) temperature independent yields, thus a production of the light nuclei at temperatures much lower than the chemical freeze-out temperature is possible.