Speaker
Description
The production of (anti)deuterons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is currently well described by two models that point to different mechanisms of particle creation. The first of the two, the coalescence model, describes the (anti)deuteron’s creation as a result of final-state interactions among (possibly off-shell) nucleons after the chemical freeze-out. The second, the thermal model predicts the formation of the (anti)deuterons inside the fireball even before the chemical freeze-out where these particles would be in equilibrium with other hadrons. The presented study aims to improve the understanding of deuterons production by studying the pion-deuteron source magnitude employing the femtoscopy method to determine the latter. The pion-deuteron particle-emitting source size can be evaluated as a function of the pair transverse mass $m_{\rm T}$ and can be compared to the source obtained for pion-pion pairs. Differences in the $m_{\rm T}$ scaling could help in discriminating between the coalescence and thermal scenario of (anti)deuteron’s creation. The presented analysis is based on the measurement of femtoscopic correlation functions of pion-deuteron pairs in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.02$ TeV using the ALICE detector.
