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  • Open Access

Interactions of the deuteron with a hadronic medium

L. M. Abreu* and R. O. Magalhães†

R. Higa‡ and F. S. Navarra§

  • *Contact author: luciano.abreu@ufba.br
  • †Contact author: rodrigomagalhaes@ufba.br
  • ‡Contact author: higa@if.usp.br
  • §Contact author: navarra@if.usp.br
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 014003 – Published 6 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zn5r-v8p8

Abstract

We investigate the interactions of the deuteron with light mesons during the hadronic phase in heavy-ion collisions. We treat the deuteron as a weakly bound state and employ the quasifree approximation to describe the dπ interaction. The underlying elementary Nπ amplitudes are described by a hybrid effective model, combining the nonresonant background from chiral perturbation theory with resonant contributions via Breit-Wigner parametrizations. These amplitudes are used to calculate the vacuum and thermally averaged cross sections for deuteron dissociation and production, namely, d+π→N+N′+π and the corresponding inverse reaction. We then use these cross sections in a rate equation to estimate the time evolution of the deuteron multiplicity. For the initial conditions, we consider two models: the statistical hadronization model and the coalescence model, where the deuteron is treated as a hadronic molecule. Our findings suggest that the final deuteron yield does not retain a memory of its initial production mechanism.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 014003– Published 6 January, 2026
  • Received 6 November 2025
  • Accepted 16 December 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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