Speaker
Description
We study deuteron interactions with light mesons in the hadronic phase of heavy-ion collisions. Treating the deuteron as a weakly bound state, we use the quasi-free approximation for the $d\pi$ interaction. The elementary $N\pi$ amplitudes are described by an effective model that combines the non-resonant background from chiral perturbation theory with resonant contributions parameterized by Breit-Wigner forms. From these amplitudes, we calculate the vacuum and thermally-averaged cross sections for deuteron dissociation and production—specifically, $d + \pi \rightarrow N + N' + \pi$ and its inverse. These cross sections are then incorporated into a rate equation to determine the time evolution of the deuteron multiplicity. For the initial conditions, we consider two scenarios: the statistical hadronization model and the coalescence model, in which the deuteron is treated as a hadronic molecule. Our results indicate that the final deuteron yield is insensitive to the initial production mechanism.