Signals of α clusters in ¹⁶O+¹⁶O collisions at the LHC from relativistic hydrodynamic simulations*

Abstract

In relativistic heavy ion collisions, the fluctuations of initial entropy density convert to correlations of final state hadrons in momentum space, through collective expansion of the strongly interacting QCD matter. We ask by using a (3+1)D viscous hydrodynamic program CLVisc whether the nuclear structure, which provides initial state fluctuations as well as correlations, can affect the final state of heavy ion collisions, whether one can find signals of α cluster structure in Oxygen using the final state observables in 16O + 16O collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For the initial nucleon distributions in Oxygen nuclei, we have compared 3 different configurations, the tetrahedral structure with four-α clusters, the deformed Woods-Saxon distribution as well as a spherical symmetric Woods-Saxon distribution. Our results show that the charged multiplicity as a function of centrality and the elliptic flow at most central collisions using 4-α structure differs from Woods-Saxon and deformed Woods-Saxon distributions, which may help to identify the α clustering structures in Oxygen nuclei.

How Sensitive Global Observables are to the Event Topology in Heavy-ion Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider: A Case Study

“…Some intend to study the parton energy loss and jet quenching effects in O-O collisions [50,51]. Interestingly, there have been a few phenomenological studies that aim to establish the effect of the presence of an α-cluster nucleus in the final state particle production [6,[43][44][45][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. A few of these studies employ O-O collisions, while others employ O-Au, C-Au, O-Pb, and Ne-Pb collisions.…”