Unveiling the dynamics of little-bang nucleosynthesis.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38316792.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-45474-x and PMC identifier 11258327.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
High-energy nuclear collisions provide a unique site for the synthesis of both nuclei and antinuclei at temperatures of kT ≈ 100 - 150 MeV. In these little bangs of transient collisions, a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) of nearly vanishing viscosity is created, which is believed to have existed in the early universe within the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Analyses of identified particles produced in these little bangs based on the statistical hadronization model for the QGP have suggested that light (anti)nuclei are produced from the QGP as other hadrons and their abundances are little affected by later hadronic dynamics. Here, we find a strong reduction of the triton yield by about a factor of 1.8 in high-energy heavy-ion collisions based on a kinetic approach that includes the effects of hadronic re-scatterings, particularly that due to pion-catalyzed multi-body reactions. This finding is supported by the latest experimental measurements and thus unveils the important role of hadronic dynamics in the little-bang nucleosynthesis.