Abstract
Coalescence has long been used to describe the production of light (anti-)nuclei in heavy ion collisions. The same underlying mechanism may also exist in jets when a proton and a neutron are close enough in phase space to form a deuteron. We model deuteron production in jets by applying an afterburner to protons and neutrons produced in PYTHIA for $p$+$p$ collisions at a center of mass energy $\sqrt{s} =$ 7 TeV. PYTHIA provides a reasonable description of the proton spectra and the shape of the deuteron spectrum predicted by the afterburner is in agreement with the data. We show that the rise in the coalescence parameter $B_2$ with momentum observed in data is consistent with coalescence in jets. We show that di-hadron correlations can be used to separate the contributions from the jet and the underlying event. This model predicts that the conditional coalescence parameter in the jet-like correlation should be independent of the trigger momentum.
Highlights
The production of lightnuclei is of interest in highenergy particle collisions because of the insight that these measurements can provide into particle production mechanisms [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]
We propose disentangling the contributions from the underlying event and in jets using dihadron correlations, which are frequently used to measure the production of jets in heavy-ion collisions without the need for full jet reconstruction and allow separation between contributions from jets and from flow
PYTHIA uses the primary vertex as the origin of primary particles and likely overestimates spatial correlations between protons and neutrons
Summary
The production of light (anti)nuclei is of interest in highenergy particle collisions because of the insight that these measurements can provide into particle production mechanisms [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. The recent results from the STAR experiment on the coefficient of the second term of the Fourier decomposition of the azimuthal anisotropy, v2, as a function of transverse momentum of various nuclei show scaling with the number of constituent nucleons [18]. This behavior is expected if light nuclei are formed by the coalescence of nucleons. Deuteron production has been measured recently in pp collisions [15,23], an interesting data set to study production through coalescence.
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