Momentum dependence of light nuclei production in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We study the momentum dependence of light nuclei produced in high energy collisions in the nucleon recombination mechanism. We derive simple formulas of the momentum distributions of deuterons (d) and helions ( 3 He). In particular, we obtain the analytic expressions of recombination/coalescence factors B A 's (B 2 for d and B 3 for 3 He) as functions of the system size and the momentum. We apply the deduced results to pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions to naturally explain behaviors of B A 's as functions of the pseudorapidity density of charged particles (dN ch /dη) and the transverse momentum per nucleon (p T /A) observed in experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.