Alpha clusters and collective flow in ultra-relativistic carbon - heavy nucleus collisions

Abstract

We investigate ultrarelativistic collisions of the 12C nucleus with heavy targets and show that the harmonic flow measures based on ratios of cumulant moments are particularly suited to study the intrinsic deformation of the 12C wave function. That way one can probe the expected alpha clusterization in the ground state, which leads to large initial triangularity in the shape of the fireball in the transverse plane. We show that the clusterization effect results in very characteristic behavior of the ratios of the cumulant moments as functions of the number of participant nucleons, both for the elliptic and triangular deformations. Thus the experimental event-by-event studies of harmonic flow in ultrarelativistic light-heavy collisions may offer a new window to look at the ground-state structure of light nuclei.

11 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (16)

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• Clustering structure effect on Hanbury-Brown-Twiss correlation in ${}^{12}$C + ${}^{197}$Au collisions at 200 GeV}
• Anisotropy fluctuation and correlation in central $\alpha$-clustered ${}^{12}$C+${}^{197}$Au collisions
• Influence of nuclear structure in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• System evolution of forward-backward multiplicity correlations in a multi-phase transport model
• Production and anisotropic flow of thermal photons in collision of $\alpha$-clustered carbon with heavy nuclei at relativistic energies
• Mean free path of photons in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• System size dependence of baryon-strangeness correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions from a multiphase transport model
• Nuclear cluster structure effect in ${}^{16}$O+${}^{16}$O collisions at the top RHIC energy
• Signatures of an $\alpha$ + core structure in ${}^{44}$Ti + ${}^{44}$Ti collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV by a multiphase transport model
• An overview of new measurements of flow, chirality, and vorticity from STAR experiment
• Probing Nuclear Geometry through Multi-Particle Azimuthal Correlations and Rapidity-Even Dipolar Flow in ${}^{16}$O+${}^{16}$O Collisions
• Influence of Cluster Configurations and Nucleon--Nucleon Scattering Cross-Section on Stopping Power in Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Rapidity dependence of mean transverse momentum fluctuation and decorrelation in baryon-dense medium