Peeling away neutron skin in ultracentral collisions of relativistic nuclei

Clustering in Oxygen Nuclei and Spectator Fragments in 16O–16O Collisions at the LHC

“…As shown in Ref. [19], the production of deuterons in ultracentral 208 Pb-208 Pb collisions at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN was enhanced in calculations with accounting for SRC. A similar effect can be expected in modelling 16 O- 16 O collisions at the LHC.…”

“…Following the calculation of ε for each prefragment, the pre-equilibrium clusterization of the prefragments is modelled by means of the MST-clustering algorithm described in Refs. [14,19].…”

“…[18]. As shown by modelling ultracentral 208 Pb-208 Pb collisions, the average numbers of spectator deuterons calculated for such collisions are affected by including SRC in AAMCC-MST [19]. Therefore, it is also necessary to evaluate the influence of SRC on the production of spectator nucleons and fragments in 16 O- 16 O collisions in AAMCC-MST modelling taking into account the presence of the tetrahedral α-clustered states in 16 O.…”

“…In the present paper, a new version of the AAMCC-MST model is used to simulate 16 O- 16 O collisions at the LHC. As described in Section 2, the model takes into account the admixture of α-clustered states and SRC in 16 O [16] and also pre-equilibrium clusterization of spectator matter [14,19]. Multiplicity distributions of spectator neutrons and deuterons as well as yields of secondary nuclei calculated for 16 O- 16 O collisions at the nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy, √ s NN = 6.37 TeV are presented in Section 3.…”

High-energy nuclear physics meets machine learning

“…The authors claimed that the high-energy isobar collisions can significantly improve the result of the traditional lowenergy method. In another paper, the yields of spectator protons and neutrons at the forward velocity of ultracentral collisions were proposed to be good probes of the neutron skin-sensitive to the neutron skin of 208 Pb but insensitive to other parameters during the collision [65]. A more accurate method is to measure the free spectator neutron yield ratios between 96 44 Ru + 96 44 Ru and 96 40 Zr + 96 40 Zr in ultra-central collisions [66].…”