Thermo-coalescence model for light nuclei production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

We employ a hybrid approach to describe the light nuclei production mechanism where the nucleons are assumed to be thermally produced, and are allowed to form light nuclei using a coalescence prescription. In this approach, we first fit transverse momentum ( pT p T ) distribution of nucleons using hydro-inspired boost-invariant Blast-wave model. The extracted parameters are then used to describe the deuteron pT p T spectra, along with two additional parameters that characterize the coalescence prescription employed in this study. We refer this combined approach as “thermo-coalescence model” and it is designed to study the deuteron production and describe the experimental measurements. In this work, we analyze the measured pT p T distribution of protons and deuterons from Pb–Pb collisions at the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC. We also evaluate the pT p T -integrated deuteron yields using this approach and compare with experimental measurements. A Bayesian inference framework is employed to determine the best-fit parameters of the thermo-coalescence model. Finally, we estimate the traditionally used experimental coalescence parameter ( BA B A ) within our framework in order to establish a connection between our model and the conventional coalescence approach commonly used to relate experimental data with theoretical descriptions of light nuclei production.