Abstract

We report the first measurements of cumulants, up to 4𝑡ℎ order, of deuteron number distributions and proton-deuteron correlations in Au+Au collisions recorded by the STAR experiment in phase-I of Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Deuteron cumulants, their ratios, and proton-deuteron mixed cumulants are presented for different collision centralities covering a range of center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair √𝑠NN = 7.7 to 200 GeV. It is found that the cumulant ratios at lower collision energies favor a canonical ensemble over a grand canonical ensemble in thermal models. An anti-correlation between proton and deuteron multiplicity is observed across all collision energies and centralities, consistent with the expectation from global baryon number conservation. The UrQMD model coupled with a phase-space coalescence mechanism qualitatively reproduces the collision-energy dependence of cumulant ratios and proton-deuteron correlations.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Notes/Citation Information

0370-2693/© 2024 Published by Elsevier B.V. Funded by SCOAP³. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2024.138560

Funding Information

We thank the RHIC Operations Group and RCF at BNL, the NERSC Center at LBNL, and the Open Science Grid consortium for providing resources and support. This work was supported in part by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the U.S. DOE Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Higher Education Sprout Project by Ministry of Education at NCKU, the National Research Foundation of Korea, Czech Science Foundation and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office, New National Excellency Programme of the Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India, the National Science Centre and WUT ID-UB of Poland, the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia, German Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF), Helmholtz Association, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) of Chile.

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