First Measurement of Antideuteron Number Fluctuations at Energies Available at the Large Hadron Collider

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First Measurement of Antideuteron Number Fluctuations at Energies Available at the Large Hadron Collider

S. Acharya et al. (ALICE Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 041901 – Published 25 July 2023

Abstract

The first measurement of event-by-event antideuteron number fluctuations in high energy heavy-ion collisions is presented. The measurements are carried out at midrapidity ( $| η | < 0.8$ ) as a function of collision centrality in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.02 TeV$ using the ALICE detector. A significant negative correlation between the produced antiprotons and antideuterons is observed in all collision centralities. The results are compared with a state-of-the-art coalescence calculation. While it describes the ratio of higher order cumulants of the antideuteron multiplicity distribution, it fails to describe quantitatively the magnitude of the correlation between antiproton and antideuteron production. On the other hand, thermal-statistical model calculations describe all the measured observables within uncertainties only for correlation volumes that are different with respect to those describing proton yields and a similar measurement of net-proton number fluctuations.

Received 5 May 2022
Revised 1 July 2022
Accepted 15 September 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.041901

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.