Observing the deformation of nuclei with relativistic nuclear collisions
arXiv:1910.04673 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.202301
Abstract
I show that particle collider experiments on relativistic nuclear collisions can serve as direct probes of the deformation of the colliding nuclear species. I argue that collision events presenting very large multiplicities of particles and very small values of the average transverse momentum of the emitted hadrons probe collision geometries in which the nuclear ellipsoids fully overlap along their longer side. By looking at these events one selects interaction regions whose elliptic anisotropy is determined by the deformed nuclear shape, which becomes accessible experimentally through the measurement of the elliptic flow of outgoing hadrons.
arXiv commentv1: 6 pages ; 5 figures. v2: 5 pages; 4 figures. Version accepted for publication. Removed discussion of isobaric collisions (Fig. 5) to comply with space limitations. See the follow-up paper arXiv:2004.14463 for a phenomenological application
References in corpus (21)
- Nuclear ground-state masses and deformations: FRDM(2012)
- Heavy Ion Collisions: The Big Picture, and the Big Questions
- Alternative ansatz to wounded nucleon and binary collision scaling in high-energy nuclear collisions
- Triangularity and Dipole Asymmetry in Heavy Ion Collisions
- Event-by-event fluctuations in perturbative QCD + saturation + hydro model: pinning down QCD matter shear viscosity in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
- Relativistic hydrodynamics for heavy-ion collisions
- Azimuthal anisotropy in U+U and Au+Au collisions at RHIC
- Anisotropic flow in Xe-Xe collisions at TeV
- Hydrodynamic predictions for 5.44 TeV Xe+Xe collisions
- Thermodynamics of hot strong-interaction matter from ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions
- Centrality and pseudorapidity dependence of the charged-particle multiplicity density in Xe-Xe collisions at = 5.44 TeV
- Parameterization of Deformed Nuclei for Glauber Modeling in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
- Flow fluctuations and long-range correlations: elliptic flow and beyond
- Charged-particle angular correlations in XeXe collisions at 5.44 TeV
- Collision Geometry and Flow in Uranium+Uranium Collisions
- Measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of charged-particle production in Xe+Xe collisions at TeV with the ATLAS detector
- Size fluctuations of the initial source and the event-by-event transverse momentum fluctuations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
- Fluctuations of harmonic and radial flow in heavy ion collisions with principal components
- Transverse momentum fluctuations in ultrarelativistic Pb+Pb and p+Pb collisions with wounded quarks
- Elliptic flow fluctuations in central collisions of spherical and deformed nuclei
- From the liquid drop model to lattice QCD