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The study of three- and many-body dynamics has been a long-standing goal in nuclear physics, particularly for understanding the structure of light nuclei and describing neutron-rich and dense nuclear matter. In this seminar, a new experimental method to study three-body nuclear systems by measuring correlations in the momentum space of deuteron-hadron pairs produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC is presented.
The ALICE Collaboration has performed measurements of the Kaon-deuteron and proton-deuteron correlations analyzing high-multiplicity proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV [1]. The correlation functions are compared with effective two-body calculations anchored to results from Kaon-deuteron and proton-deuteron scattering experiments that provide an excellent description of the measured Kaon deuteron correlation but fail to describe the proton-deuteron system. This discrepancy can only be resolved by performing a full three-body calculation that accounts for the underlying three-nucleon dynamics. The analysis demonstrates that nucleons are the explicit degrees of freedom also in the correlations among light nuclei produced at short distances in hadronic collisions and opens the possibility of investigating the effect of genuine many-body nuclear interactions at the LHC in the future, including systems with strangeness and charm.
[1] ALICE Collaboration, Phys. Rev. X 14, 031051 (2024)