The deuteron yield in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76\mathrm{TeV}$ is consistent with thermal production at a freeze out temperature of $T=155\mathrm{MeV}$. The existence of deuterons with binding energy of 2.2 MeV at this temperature was described as “snowballs in hell” [P. Braun-Münzinger, B. Dönigus, and N. Löher, CERN Courier, August 2015]. We provide a microscopic explanation of this phenomenon, utilizing relativistic hydrodynamics and switching to a hadronic afterburner at the above-mentioned temperature of $T=155\mathrm{MeV}$. The measured deuteron $p_T$ spectra and coalescence parameter $B_2\left(p_T\right)$ are reproduced without free parameters, only by implementing experimentally known cross sections of deuteron reactions with hadrons, most importantly $\pi d\leftrightarrow \pi np$.

Background: Simulations by transport codes are indispensable for extracting valuable physical information from heavy-ion collisions. Pion observables such as the ${\pi }^{-}/{\pi }^{+}$ yield ratio are expected to be sensitive to the symmetry energy at high densities.

This article summarizes our present knowledge about nuclear matter at the highest energy densities and its formation in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We review what is known about the structure and properties of the quark-gluon plasma and survey the observables that are used to glean information about it from experimental data.

The stopping of baryons in heavy ion collisions at beam momenta of p _lab = 20–160A GeV is lacking a quantitative description within theoretical calculations. Heavy ion reactions at these energies are experimentally explored at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and will be studied at future facilities such as FAIR and NICA. Since the net baryon density is determined by the amount of stopping, this is the pre-requisite for any investigation of other observables related to structures in the QCD phase diagram such as a first-order phase transition or a critical endpoint. In this work we employ a string model for treating hadron–hadron interactions within a hadronic transport approach (SMASH, Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). Free parameters of the string excitation and decay are tuned to match experimental measurements in elementary proton–proton collisions, where some mismatch in the x _F distribution of protons is still present. Afterwards, the model is applied to heavy ion collisions, where the experimentally observed change of the shape of the proton rapidity spectrum from a single peak structure to a double peak structure with increasing beam energy is reproduced. Heavy ion collisions provide the opportunity to study the formation process of string fragments in terms of formation times and reduced interaction cross-sections for pre-formed hadrons. A good agreement with the measured rapidity spectra of protons and pions is achieved while insights on the fragmentation process are obtained. In the future, the presented approach can be used to create event-by-event initial conditions for hybrid calculations.

We study the deuteron production via the deuteron pion and nucleon catalysis reactions, $\pi pn\leftrightarrow \pi d$ and $Npn\leftrightarrow Nd$, by employing stochastic multiparticle reactions in the hadronic transport approach SMASH for the first time. This is an improvement compared to previous studies, which introduced an artificial fake resonance $d^{\prime }$ to simulate these $3\leftrightarrow 2$ reactions as a chain of $2\leftrightarrow 2$ reactions. The derivation of the stochastic criterion for multiparticle reactions is presented in a comprehensive fashion and its implementation is tested against an analytic expression for the scattering rate and the equilibrating particle yields in box calculations. We then study Au $+$ Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7$ GeV, where we find that multiparticle collisions substantially reduce the time required for deuterons to reach partial chemical equilibrium with nucleons. Subsequently, the final yield of $d$ is practically independent from the number of $d$ at particlization, confirming the results of previous studies. The mean transverse momentum and the integrated elliptic flow as a function of centrality are rather insensitive to the exact realization of the $2\leftrightarrow 3$ reactions.