Collision centrality and system size dependences of light nuclei production via dynamical coalescence mechanism

TL;DR

This study uses a dynamical coalescence model coupled with a transport simulation to analyze light nuclei formation in heavy-ion collisions, revealing dependencies on collision centrality and system size, and aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a combined dynamical phase-space coalescence and transport model to study light nuclei production across different system sizes and collision centralities, providing new insights into production mechanisms.

Findings

Yields of light nuclei increase with system size.

Coalescence parameters $B_{2}$ and $B_{3}$ increase with transverse momentum and centrality.

Production probability of light nuclei correlates with fireball size.

Abstract

Light (anti-)nuclei in relativistic heavy-ion collisions are considered to be formed by the coalescence mechanism of (anti-)nucleons in the present work. Using a dynamical phase-space coalescence model coupled with a multi-phase transport (AMPT) model, we explore the formation of light clusters such as deuteron, triton and their anti-particles in different centralities for $^{197}$Au + $^{197}$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 39$ GeV. The calculated transverse momentum spectra of protons, deuterons, and tritons are comparable to those of experimental data from the RHIC-STAR collaboration. Both coalescence parameters $B_{2}$ for (anti-)deuteron and $B_{3}$ for triton increase with the transverse momentum as well as the collision centrality, and they are comparable with the measured values in experiments. The effect of system size on the production of light nuclei is also investigated by $^{10}$B + $^{10}$B, $^{16}$O + $^{16}$O, $^{40}$Ca + $^{40}$Ca, and $^{197}$Au + $^{197}$Au systems in central collisions. The results show that yields of light nuclei increase with system size, while the values of coalescence parameters present an opposite trend. It is interesting to see that the system size, as well as the centrality dependence of $B_A$ ($A$ = 2, 3), falls into the same group, which further demonstrates production probability of light nuclei is proportional to the size of the fireball. Furthermore, we compare our coalescence results with other models, such as the thermal model and analytic coalescence model, it seems that the description of light nuclei production is consistent with each other.