Study of the deuterons emission time in pp collisions at the LHC via kaon-deuteron correlations

Abstract

The femtoscopy correlation between positively charged kaons and deuterons measured in pp collisions at \(\sqrt{s}=\) 13 TeV at the LHC with the ALICE experiment is employed to determine the upper limit for the time delay of the deuteron emission in such collisions with respect to all other hadrons. Two scenarios are considered: the first assumes that deuterons form following the decays of short-lived strong resonances, while the second assumes that deuteron production occurs simultaneously with all other primary hadrons. For both scenarios, an additional delay time for deuteron formation can be introduced using the CECA source model and its upper limit can be extracted by fitting the femtoscopy correlation, incorporating models of the final state K\(^+\) d strong interaction. For the scenario where deuterons production is affected by baryonic resonances the upper limit of the time delay is 2.25 fm/c, while for the primary production scenario the upper limit is 4.75 fm/c. These results align with the hypothesis of an early formation of the deuteron as an extended, weakly bound composite object in ultra-relativistic proton-proton collisions at the LHC.