Investigation of hadronic effects on resonance productions in small collision systems using the EPOS4 model

Abstract

Recent experimental results in high-multiplicity proton-proton (pp) collisions have suggested the possible emergence of collective behavior and medium-like effects previously considered characteristic of heavy-ion collisions. Resonance production provides a sensitive probe of such effects, as resonance yields and transverse-momentum distributions can be modified by hadronic interactions occurring between chemical and kinetic freeze-out. In this study, these effects are investigated using the EPOS4 event generator, in which hadronic final-state interactions are modeled through the UrQMD transport approach. By comparing calculations performed with and without UrQMD, the impact of hadronic interactions on resonance production is evaluated. In addition, the UrQMD contributions are separated into regeneration and rescattering, enabling a detailed investigation of both resonance production enhancement and the loss of reconstructible resonance signals. The analysis is performed for various mesonic and baryonic resonances with different lifetimes in pp collisions at LHC energies and is extended to p-O, O-O, and Pb-Pb collisions to study the system-size dependence of hadronic-phase effects. The results show that resonance production is governed by the competition between regeneration and rescattering, whose relative importance depends strongly on the resonance species, transverse momentum, and collision system. While rescattering suppresses reconstructible short-lived resonance signals, regeneration can significantly enhance the yields of several resonance species, particularly baryonic resonances. These findings demonstrate that hadronic interactions can play an important role even in small collision systems and highlight the need to measure resonances with different lifetimes and quantum numbers to constrain the dynamics and lifetime of the hadronic phase across collision systems.