Benjamin Monreal, Yale University / Lawrence Berkeley National LabTitle: Deuterons and Space-Momentum Correlations in High Energy Nuclear CollisionsAuthors: B. Monreal (Yale University); N. Xu (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); S. Panitkin (Kent State University/LBNL)Abstract: The coalescence model has proven successful for describing the formation of deuterons in high-energy nuclear collisions at SPS and AGS energies. We investigated the coalescence model's results for RHIC collisions (200 AGeV Au + 200 AGeV Au), using RQMD 2.4 and a coalescence afterburner. Preliminary investigation yielded predictions of deuteron multiplicities and distributions, and parallel results for antideuterons. We further investigated the deuteron's sensitivity to nucleon space-time-momentum correlations at freeze-out. While correlations were hinted at by the original deuteron distributions, we investigated further by altering the properties of the RQMD-modeled fireball. Removing or strengthening the space-momentum correlations (i.e. collective flow) of nucleons had a large effect (factors of 2) on several deuteron measureables. This gives us a calibrated way to infer the space-momentum structure of the fireball at freeze-out, by measuring the deuteron spectra. In addition to flow effects, we found sensitivity in low-transverse-momentum deuterons to freeze-out radius, which is an important quantity in energy density studies. |