Thermo-coalescence model for Light Nuclei production in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

We employ a hybrid approach to describe the light nuclei production mechanism where the nucleons are assumed to be thermally produced, and are allowed to form light nuclei using a coalescence prescription. In this approach, we first fit transverse momentum ($p_T$) distribution of nucleons using hydro-inspired boost-invariant blast-wave model. The extracted parameters are then used to describe the deuteron $p_T$ spectra, along with two additional parameters that characterize the coalescence prescription employed in this study. We refer this combined approach as ``thermo-coalescence model'' and it is designed to study the deuteron production and describe the experimental measurements. In this work, we analyze the measured $p_T$ distribution of protons and deuterons from Pb-Pb collisions at the ALICE Collaboration at LHC. We also evaluate the $p_T$-integrated deuteron yields using this approach and compare with experimental measurements. A Bayesian inference framework is employed to determine the best-fit parameters of the thermo-coalescence model. Finally, we estimate the traditionally used experimental coalescence parameter ($B_A$) within our framework in order to establish a connection between our model and the conventional coalescence approach commonly used to relate experimental data with theoretical descriptions of light nuclei production.

Comments: Submitted to European Physical Journal C