Unveiling the dynamics of little-bang nucleosynthesis

Kai-Jia Sun; Rui Wang; Che Ming Ko; Yu-Gang Ma; Chun Shen

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-45474-x

Unveiling the dynamics of little-bang nucleosynthesis

Nat Commun. 2024 Feb 5;15(1):1074. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45474-x.

Authors

Kai-Jia Sun^{1

2}, Rui Wang^{3

4}, Che Ming Ko⁵, Yu-Gang Ma^{6

7}, Chun Shen^{8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Ion-beam Application (MOE), Institute of Modern Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China. kjsun@fudan.edu.cn.
² Shanghai Research Center for Theoretical Nuclear Physics, NSFC and Fudan University, Shanghai, 200438, China. kjsun@fudan.edu.cn.
³ Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Ion-beam Application (MOE), Institute of Modern Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China.
⁴ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201800, China.
⁵ Cyclotron Institute and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA.
⁶ Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Ion-beam Application (MOE), Institute of Modern Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China. mayugang@fudan.edu.cn.
⁷ Shanghai Research Center for Theoretical Nuclear Physics, NSFC and Fudan University, Shanghai, 200438, China. mayugang@fudan.edu.cn.
⁸ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 48201, USA.
⁹ RIKEN BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, 11973, USA.

PMID: 38316792
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45474-x

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.