Aspects of deuteron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions

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Abstract
One criticism of the thermodynamic model for deuteron production has been that it may not be possible for deuterons to exist inside the fireball. We give arguments why deuterons can exist inside the fireball, although they cannot exist in cold nuclear matter at normal density. We redefine the Berkeley coalescence model and show that with this redefinition, the coalescence model is rather close to the thermodynamic prescription. We show that this redefined coalescence model is equivalent to the quantum mechanical sudden approximation model considered by Kapusta. We construct the grand canonical partition function for interacting fermions up to the second virial coefficient and show that the redefined coalescence model and the simple thermodynamic model are two limits of a more complete theory.