Deuteron identification via time of flight with LHCb

Journal article

It is shown that the timing capabilities of the LHCb detector operated during the LHC Run 2 can be used to identify light ion particles with momenta of a few GeV/c. This is achieved by estimating the particle time of flight through a newly developed technique. A dedicated reconstruction procedure and a neural-network-based estimator of the particle speed have been developed to enable deuteron identification by suppressing the abundant background from lighter particles. The performance of the identification procedure is demonstrated in a sample of proton-helium collisions at sNN = 110 GeV, where the production of deuteron and triton particles is observed. This novel approach opens the way to study deuteron and antideuteron production for different collision systems at different energy scales, exploiting the rich dataset collected by the LHCb experiment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Authors: Aaij, R; Abdelmotteleb, ASW; Beteta, CA; Abudinén, F; Ackernley, T

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SpringerOpen
• Journal: The European Physical Journal C More from this journal
• Volume: 85
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 1329
• Article number: ARTN 1329
• Publication date: 2025-11-19
• DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14776-9
• EISSN: 1434-6052
• ISSN: 1434-6044
• Language: English
• Keywords: time-of-flight; LHCb detector; background suppression; LHC Run 2; proton-helium collisions; triton production; antideuteron production