No Arabic abstract
The stopping of baryons in heavy ion collisions at beam momenta of $p_{rm lab} = 20-160A$ GeV is lacking a quantitative description within theoretical calculations. Heavy ion reactions at these energies are experimentally explored at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and will be studied at future facilities such as FAIR and NICA. Since the net baryon density is determined by the amount of stopping, this is the pre-requisiste for any investigation of other observables related to structures in the QCD phase diagram such as a first-order phase transition or a critical endpoint. In this work we employ a string model for treating hadron-hadron interactions within a hadronic transport approach (SMASH, Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). Free parameters of the string excitation and decay are tuned to match experimental measurements in elementary proton-proton collisions, where some mismatch in the $x_F$ distribution of protons is still present. Afterwards, the model is applied to heavy ion collisions, where the experimentally observed change of the shape of the proton rapidity spectrum from a single peak structure to a double peak structure with increasing beam energy is reproduced. Heavy ion collisions provide the opportunity to study the formation process of string fragments in terms of formation times and reduced interaction cross-sections for pre-formed hadrons. A good agreement with the measured rapidity spectra of protons and pions is achieved while insights on the fragmentation process are obtained. In the future, the presented approach can be used to create event-by-event initial conditions for hybrid calculations.
Heavy-ion collisions at low beam energies explore the high density regime of strongly-interacting matter. The dynamical evolution of these collisions can be successfully described by hadronic transport approaches. In March 2019, the HADES collaboration has taken data for AgAg collisions at $E_{rm Kin}=1.58A$ GeV and in this work, we provide predictions for particle production and spectra within the Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons (SMASH) approach. The multiplicities and spectra of strange and non-strange particles follow the expected trends as a function of system size. In particular, in AuAu collisions, much higher yields of double-strange baryons were observed experimentally than expected from a thermal model. Therefore, we incorporate a previously suggested mechanism to produce $Xi$ baryons via rare decays of high mass $N^*$ resonances and predict the multiplicities. In addition, we predict the invariant mass spectrum for dilepton emission and explore the most important sources of dileptons above 1 GeV, that are expected to indicate the temperature of the medium. Interestingly, the overall dilepton emission is very similar to the one in AuAu collisions at $1.23 A$ GeV, a hint that the smaller system at a higher energy behaves very similar to the larger system at lower beam energy.
Microscopic transport approaches are the tool to describe the non-equilibrium evolution in low energy collisions as well as in the late dilute stages of high-energy collisions. Here, a newly developed hadronic transport approach, SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) is introduced. The overall bulk dynamics in low energy heavy ion collisions is shown including the excitation function of elliptic flow employing several equations of state. The implications of this new approach for dilepton production are discussed and preliminary results for afterburner calculations at the highest RHIC energy are presented and compared to previous UrQMD results. A detailed understanding of a hadron gas with vacuum properties is required to establish the baseline for the exploration of the transition to the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions at high net baryon densities.
The production of antiprotons in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus reactions is calculated within the relativistic BUU approach employing proper selfenergies for the baryons and antiprotons and treating the p-bar annihilation nonperturbatively. The differential cross section for the antiprotons is found to be very sensitive to the p-bar selfenergy adopted. A detailed comparison with the available experimental data for p-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus reactions shows that the antiproton feels a moderately attractive mean-field at normal nuclear matter density which is in line with a dispersive potential extracted from the free annihilation cross section.
The stopping behaviour of baryons in massive heavy ion collisions (at SPS, RHIC and LHC) is investigated within different microscopic models. At SPS-energies the predictions range from full stopping to virtually total transparency. Experimental data are indicating strong stopping. The initial baryo-chemical potentials and temperatures at collider energies and their impact on the formation probability of strange baryon clusters and strangelets are discussed.
Collective flow observables are known to be a sensitive tool to gain insights on the equation of state of nuclear matter from heavy-ion collision observations. Towards more quantitative constraints one has to carefully assess other influences on the collective behaviour. In this work a hadronic transport approach SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) is applied to study the first four anisotropic flow coefficients in Au+Au collisions at $E_{rm lab}=1.23A$ GeV in the context of the recently measured data by the HADES collaboration. In particular, the formation of light nuclei is important in this energy regime. Two different approaches are contrasted to each other: A clustering algorithm inspired by coalescence as well as microscopic formation of deuterons via explicit cross-sections. The sensitivity of directed and elliptic flow observables to the strength of the Skyrme mean field is explored. In addition, it is demonstrated that the rapidity-odd $v_3$ coefficient is practically zero in this energy regime and the ratio of $v_4/v_2^2$ is close to the value of 0.5 expected from hydrodynamic behaviour. This study establishes the current understanding of collective behaviour within the SMASH approach and lays the ground for future more quantitative constraints on the equation of state of nuclear matter within improved mean field calculations.