Progress Towards Determining the Density Dependence of the Nuclear Symmetry Energy Using Heavy-Ion Reactions

Abstract

The latest development in determining the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy using heavy-ion collisions is reviewed. Within the IBUU04 version of an isospin- and momentum-dependent transport model using a modified Gogny effective interaction, recent experimental data from NSCL/MSU on isospin diffusion are found to be consistent with a nuclear symmetry energy of $E_{sym}(\rho )\approx 31.6(\rho /{\rho }_0{)}^{1.05}$ at subnormal densities. Predictions on several observables sensitive to the density dependence of the symmetry energy at supranormal densities accessible at GSI and the planned Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) are also made.

10 pages. Talk given at the 21st Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Breckenridge, Colorado, USA, Feb. 5-12, 2005. To appear in Heavy-Ion Physics (2005)

References in corpus (5)

• Reaction Dynamics with Exotic Beams
• Determination of the stiffness of the nuclear symmetry energy from isospin diffusion
• Near-threshold pion production with radioactive beams at the Rare Isotope Accelerator
• Probing the isospin dependence of the in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross sections with radioactive beams
• Isospin dependence of nucleon emission and radial flow in heavy-ion collisions induced by high energy radioactive beams