Speaker
Description
New results on the production of light nuclei, including deuterons, tritons,
$^{3}\rm{He}$, $^{4}\rm{He}$ and the corresponding anti-nuclei, in Pb-Pb collisions
at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV and $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV will be presented
and compared with theoretical predictions to provide insight into their production
mechanisms in heavy-ion collisions. Those results will be complemented by the production
measurement of nuclei containing one strange baryon, namely the (anti-)hypertriton,
exploiting both the invariant mass method and a machine learning approach to enhance
the significance of the measurement with respect to the published results.
We also present the latest measurement of the hypertriton lifetime aiming at shedding
light on the hypertriton lifetime puzzle. During the end of LHC Run 2, the ALICE experiment
recorded Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV that complement the already
available Pb-Pb datasets. Indeed, most calculations on the hypertriton lifetime give
similar values, which are close to the lifetime of free $\Lambda$ decays. On the
experimental side, all results from other heavy-ion experiments show a significantly
shorter lifetime in comparison with that of the free $\Lambda$ decay.
Furthermore, new results on the measurement of the elliptic and the triangular flow of
deuteron and $^{3}$He produced in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV
will be presented and they will be compared to the lower energy results and to the
expectations from coalescence and hydrodynamic models. The measurement of the elliptic
and triangular flow of light nuclei provides a powerful tool to give insight into their
production mechanism and freeze-out properties at a late stage of the collision evolution.
Finally, the large variety of measurements performed with the ALICE apparatus at different
energies allows us to constrain the models of the production mechanisms of light-flavour
baryon clusters, in particular those based on the coalescence and statistical hadronisation
approaches.
