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arXiv · 2504.02393

Observation of deuteron and antideuteron formation from resonance-decay nucleons

ALICE Collaboration
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Abstract

High-energy hadronic collisions generate environments characterized by temperatures above 100 MeV [1,2], about 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. It is therefore currently unclear how light (anti)nuclei with mass number A of a few units, such as the deuteron, $^3$He, or $^4$He, each bound by only a few MeV, can emerge from these collisions [3,4]. The ALICE collaboration reports that deuteron-pion momentum correlations in proton-proton (pp) collisions provide model-independent evidence that about 90% of the observed (anti)deuterons are produced in nuclear reactions [5] following the decay of short-lived resonances, such as the $\Delta (1232)$. These findings, obtained by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resolve a gap in our understanding of nucleosynthesis in ultra-relativistic hadronic collisions. Beyond offering insights on how (anti)nuclei are formed in hadronic collisions, the results can be employed in the modeling of the production of light and heavy nuclei in cosmic rays [6] and dark matter decays [7,8].

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ALICE Collaboration. 2025-04-03. Observation of deuteron and antideuteron formation from resonance-decay nucleons. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02393

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