How Loosely-Bound States are Produced in Heavy-Ion Collisions: The Snowball in Hell Puzzle

When atoms are stripped of all their electrons, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, and collided, they can produce a region of quark-gluon plasma (GQP). The collision of these ions, called "Little Bangs", are said to reproduce the first moments of the universe, just after the Big Bang, when the universe was incredibly hot and dense. Despite these large energy scales, bound states such as the deuteron have been observed to emerge from the collision reminants. Especially in modern colliders, where the energy scales associated to the QGP are orders of magnitudes larger than that of deuteron's binding energy, the production of such states has been confounding and subject to rigorous research, and termed the "Snowball in Hell"-puzzle. In this talk, I will present a resolution to the puzzle, as well as talk about the exceptional hadron X(3872), first observed in 2001, which led us to this puzzle and subsequently its resolution.