Elliptic flow of deuterons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We calculate the elliptic flow of deuterons in Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon-nucleon pair and show that it can be used to discriminate between direct statistical production and coalescence. The emission from the fireball is parametrized and tuned to reproduce transverse momentum spectra and the elliptic flow of protons and pions. Coalescence leads to higher deuteron elliptic flow than statistical production and agrees better with experimental data. We attribute this observation to the varying size of the nucleon-producing region for the emission in different azimuthal angles.