Extraction of ground-state nuclear deformations from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions: Nuclear structure physics context

Abstract

The collective-flow-assisted nuclear shape-imaging method in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions has recently been used to characterize nuclear collective states. In this paper, we assess the foundations of the shape-imaging technique employed in these studies. We argue that some current UHIC nuclear imaging techniques neglect fundamental aspects of spontaneous symmetry-breaking and symmetry-restoration in colliding ions and incorrectly infer one-body multipole moments from studies of nucleonic correlations. Therefore, the impact of this approach on nuclear structure research has been overstated. Conversely, efforts to incorporate existing knowledge on nuclear shapes into analysis pipelines can be beneficial for benchmarking tools and calibrating models used to extract information from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiments.

Version Accepted to Phys. Rev. Res

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• Glauber predictions for oxygen and neon collisions at energies available at the LHC
• Observation of long-range collective flow in OO and NeNe collisions and implications for nuclear structure studies
• Imprints of octupole collectivity in uranium-238 on relativistic heavy-ion flow observables