Selected highlights of the production of light (anti-)(hyper-)nuclei in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions
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Review
Selected highlights of the production of light (anti-)(hyper-)nuclei in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions Benjamin Dönigusa Institut für Kernphysik, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
Received: 3 August 2020 / Accepted: 8 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 Communicated by David Blaschke
Abstract The production of light (anti-)nuclei and (anti-) hypernuclei in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, but also in more elementary collisions as proton–proton and proton–nucleus collisions, became recently a focus of interest. In particular, the fact that these objects are all loosely bound compared to the temperature and energies, e.g. the kinetic energies involved, is often stressed out to be special for their production. The binding energies of these (anti-) nuclei is between 130 keV ( separation energy in the hypertriton) and about 8 MeV per nucleon. Whereas the connected temperatures are of the order of 100 to 160 MeV. This lead to some difficulties in the interpretation of the usually discussed production models, i.e. coalescence and statistical-thermal models, as will be discussed here. In this brief review we discuss selected highlights of the production of light (anti-) nuclei, such as (anti-)deuteron, (anti-)helium and (anti-) alpha nuclei. In addition, we will discuss the current status of the highly debated lifetime of the (anti-)hypertriton and connected measurements and model results.
1 Introduction Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions (i.e. gold–gold (Au– Au) at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL, √ with a top collision energy of sNN = 200 GeV, and leadlead (Pb–Pb) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, with current top collision energy for Pb–Pb collisions of √ √ sNN = 5.02 TeV and s = 13 TeV for pp collisions) are usually seen as the experimental tool for the creation of the quark-gluon plasma. The quark-gluon plasma is a droplet of deconfined matter formed in the very high temperatures of the mentioned collisions. A similar phase transition is one of the sequences in the time-evolution of the early universe. It is the main aim of the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion physics a e-mail:
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to create the quark-gluon plasma and to study its properties. To understand these properties, control measurements in proton–proton (pp) and proton–nucleus (p–Au at RHIC and p–Pb at the LHC) collisions have to be done. These control measurements have turned out to be very interesting on their own, as we will see in the following. The traditional idea of doing p–Pb and d–Au collisions is to provide a reference for the Pb–Pb and Au–Au collisions, in order to investigate so called cold nuclear matter (initial state) effects. The investigation of the production of nuclei has been an active part in the studies of heavy-ion collisions since their beginning. This is also connected to the fact that the low-energy heavy-ion physics is clearly more connected to nuclear structure physics, since for instance the st
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