Coupling dynamical and statistical mechanisms for baryonic cluster production in nucleus collisions of intermediate and high energies

TL;DR

This paper proposes a combined dynamical and statistical model for baryonic cluster production in nucleus collisions, explaining experimental yields and energy dependence through excited cluster formation and decay, with implications for hypernuclear matter.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-step mechanism involving excited baryon clusters and their decay, providing a unified interpretation of fragment yields across energies.

Findings

Explains experimental fragment yields including energy dependence.

Identifies regularities in cluster yield, isospin, and energy.

Suggests a generalization to hypernuclear matter.

Abstract

Central nucleus-nucleus collisions produce many new baryons and the nuclear clusters can be formed from these species. The phenomenological coalescence models were sufficiently good for description of light nuclei yields in a very broad range of collision energies. We demonstrate that in reality the coalescence process can be considered as 1) the formation of primary diluted excited baryon clusters and 2) their following statistical decay leading to the final cold fragment production. We argue that the formation of such excited systems from the interacting baryons is a natural consequence of the nuclear interaction at subnuclear densities resulting in the nuclear liquid-gas type phase transition in finite systems. In this way one can provide a consistent interpretation of the experimental fragment yields (FOPI data) including the important collision energy dependence in relativistic ion reactions. We investigate the regularities of this new kind of fragment production, for example, their yield, isospin, and kinetic energy characteristics. A generalization of such a clusterization mechanism for hypernuclear matter is suggested. The isotope yields and particle correlations should be adequate for studying these phenomena.