Imprints of Quantum Gravity on the Cooper-Frye Freeze-Out

Document Type : Letter

Author

Canadian Quantum Research Center, 460 Doyle Ave 106, Kelowna, BC V1Y 0C2, Canada; Department of Computer Sciences, Asian School of Business, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 201303, India

Abstract

This work shows that quantum-gravity-motivated generalized uncertainty principles (GUP) produce calculable and phenomenologically relevant modifications to the Cooper-Frye freeze-out prescription that maps hydrodynamic fields to hadronic momentum spectra in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Using the linear Ali Das Vagenas GUP, which alters both the phase-space measure and the single-particle dispersion relation, the corresponding deformed particle current is constructed and its flux across a freeze-out hypersurface is evaluated. The resulting invariant spectrum acquires a momentum-dependent correction governed by a single dimensionless function that enhances high-momentum modes. For a static, homogeneous hypersurface the full expression can be written in closed analytic form, and the structure of the correction allows straightforward implementation in blast-wave-type models. The result is also directly relevant to holography-informed heavy-ion modeling, where gauge/gravity duality constrains the strongly coupled plasma dynamics but the conversion to hadron spectra is still performed through a Cooper-Frye freeze-out map.  Our findings demonstrate that Planck-scale deformations of quantum mechanics can leave characteristic imprints on freeze-out observables, opening a novel avenue for constraining GUP scenarios with heavy-ion data.

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Volume 6, Issue 3
March 2026
Pages 20-30
  • Receive Date: 06 December 2025
  • Revise Date: 31 January 2026
  • Accept Date: 31 January 2026