Fecková, Zuzana, 1988-

Formation of deuterons by coalescence : consequences for deuteron number fluctuations / Zuzana Fecková ... [et al.]. -- Two scenarios for cluster production have long been discussed in the literature: (i) direct emission of the clusters from a (grand-canonical) thermal source or (ii) subsequent formation of the clusters by coalescence of single nucleons. While both approaches have been successfully applied in the past it has not yet been clarified which of the two mechanisms dominates the cluster production. We propose to use recently developed event-by-event techniques to study particle multiplicity fluctuations on nuclear clusters and employ this analysis to the deuteron number fluctuations to disentangle the two production mechanisms. We argue that for a grand-canonical cluster formation, the cluster fluctuations will follow Poisson distribution, while for the coalescence scenario, the fluctuations will strongly deviate from the Poisson expectation. We estimate the effect to be 10% for the variance and up to a factor of 5 for the kurtosis of the deuteron number multiplicity distribution. Our prediction can be tested in the beam energy scan program at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as well as experiments at the GSI Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research and the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility.

In Physical Review C. -- Maryland : American Physical Society, 2016. -- ISSN 2469-9985. -- ISSN 2469-9993. -- Vol. 93, no. 5 (2016), pp. 1-5