Baryon preclustering at the freeze-out of heavy-ion collisions and light-nuclei production
Edward Shuryak, Juan M. Torres-Rincón
Abstract
Following the idea of nucleon clustering and light-nuclei production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions close to the QCD critical-end point, we address the quantum effects affecting the interaction of several nucleons at finite temperature. For this aim we use the $K$-harmonics method to four-nucleon states ($\ensuremath{\alpha}$ particle), and also develop a novel semiclassical ``flucton'' method at finite temperature, based on certain classical paths in Euclidean time, and apply it to two- and four-particle configurations. To study possible effects on the light-nuclei production close to the QCD critical point, we also made such calculations with modified internuclear potentials. For heavy-ion experiments, we propose new measurements of light-nuclei multiplicity ratios which may show enhancements due to baryon preclustering. We point out the special role of the $\mathcal{O}(50)$ four-nucleon excitations of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-particle, feeding into the final multiplicities of $d,t$, $^{3}\mathrm{He}$, and $^{4}\mathrm{He}$, and propose to directly look for their two-body decays.