Multi-charmed and singled charmed hadrons from coalescence: yields and ratios in different collision systems at LHC

TL;DR

This study models the production of single and multi-charmed hadrons in heavy ion collisions at LHC, providing predictions for yields and ratios across different system sizes to inform future experimental investigations.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled transport and coalescence/fragmentation model to predict charmed hadron yields, including first predictions for multi-charmed baryons in various collision systems.

Findings

Yields of $ ext{Xi}_{cc}$ and $ ext{Omega}_{ccc}$ increase with system size.

Approximately three orders of magnitude increase in $ ext{Omega}_{ccc}$ production from small to large systems.

System size dependence of charm quark distribution affects $ ext{Omega}_{ccc}$ spectra and can indicate charm thermalization.

Abstract

We study the production of charmed and multi-charmed hadrons in ultra-relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions coupling the transport approach for charm dynamics in the medium to an hybrid hadronization model of coalescence plus fragmentation. In this paper, we mainly discuss the particle yields for single charmed and multi-charmed baryons focusing mainly on the production of $\Xi_{cc}$ and $\Omega_{ccc}$. We provide first predictions for PbPb collision in 0-10% centrality class and then we explore the system size dependence through KrKr, to ArAr and OO collisions, planned within the ALICE3 experiment. In these cases, a monotonic behavior for the yields emerges which can be tested in future experimental data. We found about three order of magnitude increase in the production of $\Omega_{ccc}$ in PbPb collisions compared with the yield in small collision systems like OO collisions. Furthermore, we investigate the effects on the $\Omega_{ccc}$ particle production and spectra coming from the modification of the charm quark distribution due to the different size of the collision systems comparing also to the case of thermalized charm distributions. These results suggest that observation on the $\Omega_{ccc}$ spectra and their evolution across system size can give information about the partial thermalization of the charm quark distribution as well as to its wave function width.