Eur. Phys. J. C 23, 237-247 (2002)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100520100877

Deuteron and triton production with high energy sulphur and lead beams

¹ Niels Bohr Institute, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
² Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
³ Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
⁴ Nuclear Physics Laboratory of Nantes, 44072 Nantes, France
⁵ Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8526, Japan
⁶ CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
⁷ Rudjer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
⁸ Cyclotron Institute, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
⁹ Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
¹⁰ State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11973, USA
¹¹ Department of Physics, University of Lund, 22362 Lund, Sweden
¹² Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA

Received: 23 July 2001
Revised: 16 November 2001
Published online: 25 January 2002

Abstract

Proton and deuteron production has been observed in S+S and S+Pb collisions at 200 A·GeV and in Pb+Pb reactions at 158 A·GeV at the CERN SPS accelerator. For Pb+Pb triton production was also measured. The p and d spectra as well as the p and t spectra were observed in similar rapidity ranges and over similar ranges of transverse momenta per nucleon, making it possible to interpret the cross sections of the composite particles in terms of coalescence mechanisms. Volumes of homogeneity were extracted and compared to pion-pair HBT interferometry results. Special attention is given to the dependence on transverse mass, centrality and rapidity.