Multi-charmed and singled charmed hadrons from coalescence: yields and ratios in different collision systems at LHC

Abstract We study the production of charmed and multi-charmed hadrons in ultra-relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions coupling the transport approach for charm dynamics in the medium to an hybrid hadronization model of coalescence plus fragmentation. In this paper, we mainly discuss the particle yields for single charmed and multi-charmed baryons focusing mainly on the production of $$\Xi _{cc}$$ Ξ cc and $$\Omega _{ccc}$$ Ω ccc . We provide first predictions for PbPb collision in $$0 \! - \! 10\%\ $$ 0 - 10 % centrality class and then we explore the system size dependence through KrKr , to ArAr and OO collisions, planned within the ALICE3 experiment. In these cases, a monotonic behavior for the yields emerges which can be tested in future experimental data. We found about three order of magnitude increase in the production of $$\Omega _{ccc}$$ Ω ccc in PbPb collisions compared with the yield in small collision systems like OO collisions. Furthermore, we investigate the effects on the $$\Omega _{ccc}$$ Ω ccc particle yield and spectra coming from the modification of the charm quark distribution due to the different size of the collision systems also comparing it to the case of thermalized charm distributions. These results suggest that observation on the $$\Omega _{ccc}$$ Ω ccc spectra and their evolution across system size can give novel information about the partial thermalization of the charm quark distribution as well as to its wave function width. Furthermore, we find that the $$\Omega _{ccc}$$ Ω ccc / $$D^0$$ D 0 ratio is an observable more sensitive with respect to $$\Lambda _c$$ Λ c / $$D^0$$ D 0 , this ratio is predicted to span over two order of magnitude from large to small systems.