Gießen 2024 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 66: Structure and Dynamics of Nuclei XIII

HK 66.4: Talk

Thursday, March 14, 2024, 16:30–16:45, HBR 19: C 5b

Realistic Coalescence model for deuteron formation — •Maximilian Horst and Laura Fabbietti — Technische Universität München

Coalescence is one of the main models to describe the formation of light nuclei in high-energy collisions. It assumes that protons and neutrons are formed at chemical freeze-out, and bind together if they are close in phase-space. In the past, simplistic models, such as the spherical approximation and box-coalescence, have been used to describe this process. However, all of these models fail to describe the measured results without fitting free parameters. As such, they lack predictive power in regimes where nuclear production yields are not yet measured. This is problematic since one of the most intriguing applications of coalescence is looking for signatures of dark matter in cosmic ray antinuclei. This application requires extrapolation from the current high energy measurement at LHC energies at the TeV scale to the astrophysically relevant collision energies of ∼20 GeV. A promising advanced coalescence model is one that employs the Wigner function formalism to predict deuteron yields without free parameters as long as the size of the emission source and the nucleon momentum distributions are measured. However, the source size has never been measured in small systems outside the LHC energies. In this talk, we present a newly developed Toy Monte Carlo model called ToMCCA, which we use to fit the source size and predict deuteron yields for arbitrary energies. This work is funded by BMBF Verbundforschung (05P21WOCA1 ALICE) and DFG SFB1258

Keywords: Coalescence; Nuclei; Deuteron; Dark Matter; Cosmic Rays