The abundances of light nuclei probe the later stages of the evolution of a system formed in a relativistic heavy-ion collision. After the system has cooled and expanded, nucleons in close proximity and moving with small relative momenta coalesce to form nuclei. Light nuclei production enables the study of several topics, including the mechanism of composite particle production, freeze-out temperature, size of the interaction region, and entropy of the system. NA44 is the only relativistic heavy-ion experiment to have both deuteron and antideuteron results in both pA and AA collisions and the first CERN experiment to study the physics topics addressed by d and d production.
PRELIMINARY DATA.
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