https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14800-y
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Flavour-dependent chemical freeze-out of light nuclei in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
1
Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati, 517619, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
2
Wright Laboratory, Yale University, 06520, New Haven, CT, USA
3
Physics Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 60439, Lemont, IL, USA
a
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received:
12
July
2025
Accepted:
16
September
2025
Published online:
30
September
2025
We study the production of light nuclei in Au+Au collisions at 
= 7.7–200 GeV and Pb+Pb collisions at = 2.76 and 5.02 TeV within a flavour-dependent chemical freeze-out scenario, assuming different flavoured hadrons undergo separate chemical freeze-out. Using the Thermal-FIST package, thermal parameters extracted from fits to various sets of hadron yields, including and excluding light nuclei, are used to calculate the ratios of the yields of light nuclei, namely, d/p, 
, t/p, t/d, 
, and 
. A comparison with experimental data from the STAR and ALICE collaborations shows that a sequential freeze-out scenario provides a better description of light nuclei yield ratios than the traditional single freeze-out approach. These results suggest the flavour-dependent chemical freeze-out for final state light nuclei production persists in heavy-ion collisions at both RHIC and LHC energies.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funded by SCOAP3.
