Femtoscopy analysis of ultrasoft pion trap at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Femtoscopy studies of pion radiation in heavy-ion collisions have been conducted extensively at all available collider energies, both theoretically and experimentally. In all these studies special attention is given to mT dependency of pion femtoscopy radii, usually approximated by a power-law function at transverse momenta above 200MeV/c. However, the radii behavior has been much less explored for the ultrasoft pions, possessing transverse momentum comparable to or lower than the pion mass. For many experimental setups this region is difficult to measure. In this work we present theoretical calculations of pion emission in the ultrasoft region in the two hybrid models iHKM and LHYQUID+thERMINATOR2. Along with the particle transverse momentum spectra, we present the calculated femtoscopy radii, in both one-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. We investigate the radii dependence on pair mT and observe, in particular, a departure from the power-law behavior at ultrasoft momenta, potentially reflecting a decoupling of such slow pions from the rest of collectively expanding system. We provide the theoretical interpretation of this result and discuss its significance, in particular, for the ongoing nonidentical particle femtoscopy analysis for pairs consisting of a pion and a baryon (or of a pion and a charmed meson). Published by the American Physical Society 2024