Dynamical effects of spin-dependent interactions in low- and intermediate-energy heavy-ion reactions

Abstract

It is well known that non-central nuclear forces, such as the spin-orbital coupling and the tensor force, play important roles in understanding many interesting features of nuclear structures. However, their dynamical effects in nuclear reactions are poorly known since only the spin-averaged observables are normally studied both experimentally and theoretically. Realizing that spin-sensitive observables in nuclear reactions may carry useful information about the in-medium properties of non-central nuclear interactions, besides earlier studies using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach to understand effects of spin-orbital coupling on the threshold energy and spin polarization in fusion reactions, some efforts have been made recently to explore dynamical effects of non-central nuclear forces in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions using transport models. The focuses of these studies have been on investigating signatures of the density and isospin dependence of the form factor in the spin-dependent single-nucleon potential. Interestingly, some useful probes were identified in the model studies while so far there is still no data to compare with. In this brief review, we summarize the main physics motivations as well as the recent progress in understanding the spin dynamics and identifying spin-sensitive observables in heavy-ion reactions at intermediate energies. We hope the interesting, important, and new physics potentials identified in the spin dynamics of heavy-ion collisions will stimulate more experimental work in this direction.

invited review, 13 pages, 16 figures, minor modifications and references added, to appear in Frontiers of Physics

References in corpus (17)

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• Probing Cold Dense Nuclear Matter
• Momentum sharing in imbalanced Fermi systems
• Hidden pseudospin and spin symmetries and their origins in atomic nuclei
• Evidence for the Strong Dominance of Proton-Neutron Correlations in Nuclei
• Tensor Forces and the Ground-State Structure of Nuclei
• Spin-orbit splitting and the tensor component of the Skyrme interaction
• 3-D unrestricted TDHF fusion calculations using the full Skyrme interaction
• Symmetry Energy of Nucleonic Matter With Tensor Correlations
• Spin-orbit and tensor mean-field effects on spin-orbit splitting including self-consistent core polarizations
• Spin-Excitation Mechanisms in Skyrme-Force Time-Dependent Hartree-Fock
• Effects of short-range correlation reduced kinetic symmetry energy in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies
• Dissipation dynamics and spin-orbit force in time-dependent Hartree-Fock theory
• The Skyrme Tensor Force in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Production of spin-controlled rare isotope beams
• Effect of the spin-orbit interaction on flows in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies
• Isospin effects in intermediate energy heavy ion collisions

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Low-Energy Heavy-Ion Reactions and the Skyrme Effective Interaction
• Spin dynamics in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions with rigorous angular momentum conservation
• Equations of motion of test particles for solving the spin-dependent Boltzmann-Vlasov equation
• Simulating spin dynamics with spin-dependent cross sections in heavy-ion collisions
• Revisiting angular momentum conservation in transport simulations of intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions
• A spin-rotation mechanism of Einstein-de Haas effect based on a ferromagnetic disk
• Role of the Surface Energy in Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Probing properties of nuclear spin-orbit interaction with nucleon spin polarization in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions
• Origins and Impacts of High-Density Symmetry Energy
• Is nucleon spin thermalized in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions?