Nuclear structure dependences in relativistic heavy ion collisions

by Sangyong Jeon

Monday 17 Jun 2024, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

One of the ways to characterize atomic nuclei is their shapes. As a first approximation, a nucleus can be regarded as a sphere containing protons and neutrons. In reality, however, nuclei can take on a variety of different shapes such as a prolate ellipsoid (a football) or an oblate ellipsoid (a pancake) and many others. Traditionally, these shapes are indirectly inferred from excitation spectra and scattering experiments. In relativistic heavy ion collisions, deformed nuclei are made to collide at highly relativistic energies. At such high energies, time dilation and length contraction allow a more direct access to the actual geometric shapes of the nuclei. These shapes are directly translated to the shape of the final state momentum distribution via hydrodynamics of Quark-Gluon Plasma. In this talk, I will discuss how to measure the shape parameters through comprehensive simulation of relativistic heavy ion collisions.