Speaker
Description
Understanding the behavior of the nuclear symmetry energy at high baryon densities is crucial for constraining the nuclear equation of state, which plays a central role in both heavy-ion collision physics and astrophysical phenomena such as neutron stars. However, the symmetry energy at supra-saturation densities remains poorly constrained experimentally.
We present an analysis of semi-central 129,124Xe + 124,112Sn collisions at 100 MeV/nucleon, recorded in 1998 at GSI by the INDRA–ALADIN collaboration. Directed and elliptic flow observables were extracted and compared with predictions from the Improved Quantum Molecular Dynamics (ImQMD) transport model employing two Skyrme parameterizations that incorporate different neutron–proton effective mass splitting.
The achieved compression in these collisions, estimated by ImQMD to reach up to ~1.7 ρ₀, allows us to probe the symmetry energy in the supra-saturation regime. The observed agreement and discrepancies between data and model calculations provide sensitivity to effective mass splitting effects and offer new empirical constraints on the symmetry energy at densities above saturation.
