Kinetic freeze-out temperature from yields of short-lived resonances
Anton Motornenko (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Giersch Science Center, Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Volodymyr Vovchenko (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Giersch Science Center, Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA, Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Carsten Greiner (Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Horst Stoecker (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Giersch Science Center, Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, D-64291 Darmstadt, Germany, Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
A method to determine the kinetic freeze-out temperature in heavy-ion collisions from measured yields of short-lived resonances is presented. The resonance production is treated in the framework of a thermal model with an evolution between chemical and kinetic freeze-outs. The yields of many short-lived resonances are suppressed at . We determine the values of and for various centralities in Pb-Pb collisions at TeV by fitting the abundances of both the stable hadrons and the short-lived resonances such as and , which were measured by the ALICE collaboration. This allows us to extract the kinetic freeze-out temperature from the measured hadron and resonance yields alone, independent of assumptions about the flow velocity profile and the freeze-out hypersurface. The extracted values exhibit a moderate multiplicity dependence whereas drops, from in peripheral collisions to in 0%–20% central collisions. Predictions for other short-lived resonances are presented. A potential (non-)observation of a suppressed meson yield will allow us to constrain the lifetime of that meson.