Femtoscopic study of the $ \Omega \alpha $ interaction in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This study investigates the interaction between Omega baryons and alpha particles in heavy-ion collisions using femtoscopic correlations, revealing potential models' influence on correlation functions and extracting interaction parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel femtoscopic approach to study Omega-alpha interactions, comparing different potential models and analyzing their effects on correlation functions.

Findings

Correlation functions depend on the potential model used.

Large interaction range affects correlation at small source sizes.

Extracted scattering length and effective range inform about Omega-N interactions.

Abstract

The two-particle momentum correlation between the Omega-baryon ($\Omega$) and the $^{4}He (\alpha) $ in high-energy heavy ion collisions is explored. Such correlations as an alternative source of information can help us further understand the interaction between $ \Omega $ and nucleons (N). $ \Omega\alpha $ potentials in the single-folding potential approach are constructed by employing two different available $\Omega N $ interactions in $^{5}S_{2}$ channel, i.e, one is based on the (2 + 1)-flavor lattice QCD simulations near the physical point by the HAL QCD collaboration, and another is based on the meson exchanges with effective Lagrangian, where in the latter case coupled channels effect is considered. It is found that the correlation functions at small size source depends on the used potential model. This implicitly means that at high density nuclear medium, $ \Omega \alpha $ momentum correlation could drive the feature of $ \Omega N $ interactions. Moreover, by extracting the scattering length and the effective range from obtained $ \Omega\alpha $ potentials, the correlation functions are calculated within the Lednicky-Lyuboshits (LL) formalism. It is shown that since the $\Omega\alpha $ has large interaction range, the LL formula leads to different results at small source size.