(Anti-)deuteron production in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13 \ \text {TeV}$
Eur.Phys.J.C 80 (2020) 889, 2020.
The collaboration

Abstract (data abstract)
The study of (anti-)deuteron production in pp collisions has proven to be a powerful tool to investigate the formation mechanism of loosely bound states in high energy hadronic collisions. In this paper the production of $\text{(anti-)deuterons}$ is studied as a function of the charged particle multiplicity in inelastic pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using the ALICE experiment. Thanks to the large accumulated integrated luminosity, it has been possible to measure (anti-)deuteron production in pp collisions up to the same charged particle multiplicity ($\mathrm{d}N_{\mathrm{ch}}/\mathrm{d}\eta\sim26$) as measured in the high multiplicity p-Pb collisions at similar centre-of-mass energies. Within the uncertainties, the deuteron yield in pp collisions resembles the one in p-Pb interactions, suggesting a common formation mechanism behind the production of light nuclei in hadronic interactions.In this context the measurements are compared with the expectations of coalescence and Statistical Hadronisation Models (SHM).