Femtoscopic study of the $ \Omega \alpha $ interaction in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The two-particle momentum correlation between the Omega-baryon ($\Omega$) and the $^{4}He (\alpha) $ in high-energy heavy ion collisions is explored. Such correlations as an alternative source of information can help us further understand the interaction between $ \Omega $ and nucleons (N). $ \Omega\alpha $ potentials in the single-folding potential approach are constructed by employing two different available $\Omega N $ interactions in $^{5}S_{2}$ channel, i.e, one is based on the (2 + 1)-flavor lattice QCD simulations near the physical point by the HAL QCD collaboration, and the other is based on the meson exchanges with effective Lagrangian, where in the latter case the effect of coupled channels is considered. It is found that the correlation functions at small size source depends on the potential model used. This implicitly means that at high density nuclear medium, $ \Omega \alpha $ momentum correlation could carry information on the feature of $ \Omega N $ interactions. Moreover, by extracting the scattering length and the effective range from obtained $ \Omega\alpha $ potentials, the correlation functions are calculated within the Lednicky-Lyuboshits (LL) formalism. It is shown that since the $\Omega\alpha $ has large interaction range, the LL formula leads to different results at small source sizes.