Speaker
Description
In the journey to explore the strong interaction among hadrons, ALICE has for the first time flared out its femtoscopic studies to nuclei. The large data sample of high-multiplicity pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV allows the measurement of the proton-deuteron (p-d), kaon-deuteron ($\mathrm{K^{\pm}}$-d) and the Lambda-deuteron ($\Lambda$-d) momentum correlations. The femtoscopic study of these systems opens the door to investigate the formation mechanism of the light nuclei in hadron-hadron collisions.
In this contribution, the measured correlation functions for p-d, $\mathrm{K^{\pm}}$-d and $\Lambda$-d are presented and compared to theoretical predictions. In the case of p-d correlations, the data shows a shallow depletion at low relative momenta, while the full-fledged model calculations which include all relevant interactions predict a strong repulsive signal. Possible explanations include a late formation of the deuterons leading to the suppression of strong interactions between protons and deuterons. Likewise, the experimentally obtained $\mathrm{K^{\pm}}$-d correlation function shows a Coulomb-like depletion which is well reproduced by the theoretical two-body Coulomb interaction. This result presents a complementary information to the p-d on the late formation of deuterons. In addition, the measured $\Lambda$-d correlation is in agreement with hypothesis of no strong interaction due to the late formation of deuterons, supporting the findings in p-d.
