Study of the deuterons emission time in pp collisions at the LHC via kaon-deuteron correlations

TL;DR

This study uses kaon-deuteron femtoscopy correlations in 13 TeV pp collisions at the LHC to set upper limits on the deuteron emission time delay, supporting early deuteron formation as a weakly bound object.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate deuteron emission timing in pp collisions using femtoscopy correlations and compares different production scenarios.

Findings

Upper limit of 2.25 fm/c for deuteron emission delay with baryonic resonances.

Upper limit of 4.75 fm/c for primary deuteron production.

Results support early formation of deuterons as extended objects.

Abstract

The femtoscopy correlation between positively charged kaons and deuterons measured in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV at the LHC with the ALICE experiment is employed to determine the upper limit for the time delay of the deuteron emission with respect to all other hadrons. Two scenarios are considered: the first assumes that deuterons form following the decays of short-lived strong resonances, while the second assumes that deuteron production occurs simultaneously with all other primary hadrons. For both scenarios, an additional delay time can be introduced using the CECA source model and its upper limit can be extracted by fitting the femtoscopy correlation. Two models are considered for the strong K$^+$d final state interaction. For the scenario where deuterons production is affected by baryonic resonances the upper limit of the time delay is 2.25 fm/c, while for the primary production scenario the upper limit is 4.75 fm/c. These results support the hypothesis of an early formation of the deuteron as an extended, weakly bound composite object in ultra-relativistic proton-proton collisions at the LHC.