Scales in light-nuclei production near the QCD critical point

TL;DR

This paper analyzes light-nuclei production near the QCD critical point using a coalescence model, identifying dominant scales and proposing yield ratios to isolate critical effects from background contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to separate critical fluctuations from dominant scales in light-nuclei yields using phase-space cumulants and yield ratios.

Findings

Second-order phase-space cumulants dominate light-nuclei yields.

Relevant scales are much larger than critical fluctuation correlation length.

Yield ratios can cancel background scales to reveal critical effects.

Abstract

Based on the coalescence model, we analyse the light-nuclei production near the critical point by expanding the phase-space distribution function $f(\mathbf{r},\mathbf{p})$ in terms of the phase-space cumulants $\sim \langle r^m p^m\rangle_c$. We show that the dominant contribution of the phase-space distribution to the yield of light nuclei is determined by the second-order phase-space cumulants. Here, we identify the fireball size, the homogeneity length, and the effective temperature, which are encoded in the second-order phase-space cumulants, as the relevant scales in explaining the yield of light nuclei. These scales are typically much larger than the correlation length of the critical fluctuations created in the rapid expansion of the heavy-ion systems, so we need to eliminate this dominant contribution of the relevant scales in order to isolate the critical contribution from the yield of light nuclei. We find that the second-order phase-space cumulants appeared in the yields of light-nuclei with different mass numbers share a similar structure. This property allows us to construct ratios of light-nuclei yields in appropriate combinations so that the effect of the relevant scales of the light-nuclei yield cancels, which isolates the critical effects.