Eur. Phys. J. C (2024) 84: 228
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-12571-6

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Multi-charmed and singled charmed hadrons from coalescence: yields and ratios in different collision systems at LHC

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy “E. Majorana”, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia 64, 95123, Catania, Italy
² Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, INFN-LNS, Via S. Sofia 62, 95123, Catania, Italy
³ School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, and Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (MOE), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, China

^a vincenzo.minissale@dfa.unict.it

Received: 30 August 2023
Accepted: 18 February 2024
Published online: 4 March 2024

Abstract

We study the production of charmed and multi-charmed hadrons in ultra-relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions coupling the transport approach for charm dynamics in the medium to an hybrid hadronization model of coalescence plus fragmentation. In this paper, we mainly discuss the particle yields for single charmed and multi-charmed baryons focusing mainly on the production of ${\mathrm{\Xi }}_{\mathit{cc}}$ and ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathit{ccc}}$. We provide first predictions for PbPb collision in $0-10\%$centrality class and then we explore the system size dependence through KrKr , to ArAr and OO collisions, planned within the ALICE3 experiment. In these cases, a monotonic behavior for the yields emerges which can be tested in future experimental data. We found about three order of magnitude increase in the production of ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathit{ccc}}$ in PbPb collisions compared with the yield in small collision systems like OO collisions. Furthermore, we investigate the effects on the ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathit{ccc}}$ particle yield and spectra coming from the modification of the charm quark distribution due to the different size of the collision systems also comparing it to the case of thermalized charm distributions. These results suggest that observation on the ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathit{ccc}}$ spectra and their evolution across system size can give novel information about the partial thermalization of the charm quark distribution as well as to its wave function width. Furthermore, we find that the ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathit{ccc}}$ /$D^0$ ratio is an observable more sensitive with respect to ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c$ /$D^0$ , this ratio is predicted to span over two order of magnitude from large to small systems.