Exploring light nuclei production at RHIC and LHC energies with A Multi-Phase Transport model and a coalescence afterburner

Abstract

In heavy-ion collisions, understanding how light nuclei species are produced can provide insight into the nature of hadronic interactions in extreme conditions. It can also shed light on understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry and dark matter searches in astrophysical processes. To investigate the production mechanism of light nuclei such as deuteron, triton, and helium-3, we use a naive coalescence afterburner coupled to the well-known “A Multi-Phase Transport model” (AMPT). We focus on studying the production of light nuclei in central Au+Au collisions at different center of mass energies (sNN = 19.6, 39, and 200 GeV) and in Pb+Pb collisions at sNN = 2.76 TeV, at mid-rapidity. We generate events with the string melting version of AMPT, and feed the information of the nucleons with spatial and momentum conditions into the coalescence afterburner. Our study reports differential and integrated yields in transverse momentum (pT) of the light nuclei in different center of mass energies. We also estimate the coalescence parameters (BA) as a function of pT and collision energy for (anti-)deuterons, tritons and helium-3s for Au+Au and Pb+Pb collisions, which are compared to other light nuclei production studies. All results are compared with measurements from the STAR and ALICE experiments. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.