IV Hot QCD Matter Conference 2026

Investigating light nuclei production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Not scheduled

20m

Indian institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati

Poster Presentation Collectivity and Bulk Dynamics from Small to Large Collision Systems

Speaker

Arun Kumar Yadav (Department of Atomic Energy (IN))

Description

The production of light (anti-)nuclei in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion
collisions is often refered to as "snowballs in hell" puzzle: these loosely
bound states are not expected to survive a thermal medium whose
temperature exceeds their per-nucleon binding energy by roughly two
orders of magnitude. We employ a state-of-the-art hybrid thermal-
coalescence approach in which nucleons are produced from an
expanding thermal fireball and (anti-)nuclei form via coalescence in
phase space. A blast-wave fit to the (anti-)proton spectra fixes the
kinetic-freeze-out parameters, which feed the coalescence integral for
the nuclear spectra with two additional parameters: a width α setting the
momentum-fraction window for coalescence, and an overall
normalization. Using Bayesian inference, we extract the optimum values
of these parameters and reproduce the transverse-momentum spectra
and inclusive yield ratios of deuterons, tritons and ³He in Pb–Pb
collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We examine the
centrality dependence of the extracted α parameter and discuss its
implications for the coalescence picture.