Deuteron production and elliptic flow in relativistic heavy ion collisions

The hadronic transport model ART is extended to include the production and annihilation of deuterons via the reactions $\mathit{BB}\leftrightarrow \mathit{dM}$, where $B$ and $M$ stand for baryons and mesons, respectively, as well as their elastic scattering with mesons and baryons in the hadronic matter. This new hadronic transport model is used to study the transverse momentum spectrum and elliptic flow of deuterons in relativistic heavy ion collisions, with the initial hadron distributions after hadronization of the produced quark-gluon plasma taken from a blast wave model. The results are compared with those measured by the PHENIX and STAR Collaborations for $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathit{NN}}}=200$ GeV and also with those obtained from the coalescence model based on freeze-out nucleons in the transport model.

Figure 1

Transverse momentum spectra of pions and protons in midrapidity $\left|y\right|<0.5$. Data are from Ref. [25].

Figure 2

Elliptic flow $v_2$ of pions and protons for midrapidities $\left|y\right|<0.5$. Data are from Ref. [12].

Figure 3

Transverse momentum spectrum of deuterons in midrapidity $\left|y\right|<0.5$. Dashed and solid lines are for initial and final deuterons, whereas the dash-dotted line is from the coalescence model. Data are from Ref. [28].

Figure 4

Same as Fig. 3 for the deuteron elliptic flow. Data are from Refs. [12, 13].

Figure 5

Proton (scaled by a factor of $1/150$) and deuteron numbers versus time in midrapidity $\left|y\right|<0.5$.

Figure 6

Normalized freeze-out time distributions of midrapidity protons (filled circles) and deuterons in the transport model (open circles) and in the coalescence model (open squares).

Figure 7

Scaled elliptic flow in (a) transverse momentum $p_T$ and (b) transverse kinetic energy. The nucleon number $n_N$ is $1$ for the proton and $2$ for the deuteron.

Figure 8

Experimental data on the total cross sections for $pp\to d{\pi }^{+}$ [32, 33] and for $d{\pi }^{+}\to pp$ [34, 35, 36]. The solid and dashed lines are the parametrizations given in the text.

Figure 9

Experimental data from Refs. [37, 38, 39] on the total elastic cross sections for $Nd\to Nd$. The solid line is the parametrization used in this work.

Figure 10

Experimental data from Refs. [40, 41, 42, 43, 44] on the total elastic cross sections for $\pi d\to \pi d$. The solid line is the parametrization used in this work.