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Register a new userUnderstanding transport simulations of heavy-ion collisions at 100 and 400 AMeV: Comparison of heavy ion transport codes under controlled conditions
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Transport simulations are very valuable for extracting physics information from heavy-ion collision experiments. With the emergence of many different transport codes in recent years, it becomes important to estimate their robustness in extracting physics information from experiments. We report on the results of a transport code comparison project. 18 commonly used transport codes were included in this comparison: 9 Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck-type codes and 9 Quantum-Molecular-Dynamics-type codes. These codes have been required to simulate Au+Au collisions using the same physics input for mean fields and for in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross sections, as well as the same initialization set-up, the impact parameter, and other calculational parameters at 100 and 400 AMeV incident energy. Among the codes we compare one-body observables such as rapidity and transverse flow distributions. We also monitor non-observables such as the initialization of the internal states of colliding nuclei and their stability, the collision rates and the Pauli blocking. We find that not completely identical initializations constitute partly for different evolutions. Different strategies to determine the collision probabilities, and to enforce the Pauli blocking, also produce considerably different results. There is a substantial spread in the predictions for the observables, which is much smaller at the higher incident energy. We quantify the uncertainties in the collective flow resulting from the simulation alone as about $30%$ at 100 AMeV and $13%$ at 400 AMeV, respectively. We propose further steps within the code comparison project to test the different aspects of transport simulations in a box calculation of infinite nuclear matter. This should, in particular, improve the robustness of transport model predictions at lower incident energies where abundant amounts of data are available.
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Simulations by transport codes are indispensable to extract valuable physics information from heavy ion collisions. In order to understand the origins of discrepancies between different widely used transport codes, we compare 15 such codes under controlled conditions of a system confined to a box with periodic boundary, initialized with Fermi-Dirac distributions at saturation density and temperatures of either 0 or 5 MeV. In such calculations, one is able to check separately the different ingredients of a transport code. In this second publication of the code evaluation project, we only consider the two-body collision term, i.e. we perform cascade calculations. When the Pauli blocking is artificially suppressed, the collision rates are found to be consistent for most codes (to within $1%$ or better) with analytical results, or completely controlled results of a basic cascade code after eliminating the correlations within the same pair of colliding particles. In calculations with active Pauli blocking, the blocking probability was found to deviate from the expected reference values. The reason is found in substantial phase-space fluctuations and smearing tied to numerical algorithms and model assumptions in the representation of phase space. This results in the reduction of the blocking probability in most transport codes, so that the simulated system gradually evolves away from the Fermi-Dirac towards a Boltzmann distribution. As a result of this investigation, we are able to make judgements about the most effective strategies in transport simulations for determining the collision probabilities and the Pauli blocking. Investigation in a similar vein of other ingredients in transport calculations, like the mean field propagation or the production of nucleon resonances and mesons, will be discussed in the future publications.
We compare ten transport codes for a system confined in a box, aiming at improved handling of the production of $Delta$ resonances and pions, which is indispensable for constraining high-density symmetry energy from observables such as the $pi^-/pi^+$ yield ratio in heavy-ion collisions. The system in a box is initialized with nucleons at saturation density and at 60 MeV temperature. The reactions $NNleftrightarrow NDelta$ and $Deltaleftrightarrow Npi$ are implemented, but the Pauli blocking and the mean-field potential are deactivated in the present comparison. Results are compared to those from the two reference cases of a chemically equilibrated ideal gas mixture and of the rate equation. In the results of the numbers of $Delta$ and $pi$, deviations from the reference values are observed in many codes, and they depend significantly on the size of the time step. These deviations are tied to different ways in ordering the sequence of collisions and decays, that take place in the same time step. Better agreements are seen in the reaction rates and the number ratios among the isospin species of $Delta$ and $pi$. These are, however, affected by the correlations, which are absent in the Boltzmann equation, but are induced by the way particle scatterings are treated in transport calculations. The uncertainty in the transport-code predictions of the $pi^-/pi^+$ ratio for the system initialized at n/p = 1.5, after letting the existing $Delta$ resonances decay, is found to be within a few percent, which is sufficiently small so that it does not strongly impact constraining the high-density symmetry energy from heavy-ion collisions. Most of the sources of uncertainties have been understood, and individual codes may be further improved. This investigation will be extended in the future to heavy-ion collisions to ensure the problems identified here remain under control.
The production of the $X(3872)$ particle in heavy-ion collisions has been contemplated as an alternative probe of its internal structure. To investigate this conjecture, we perform transport calculations of the $X(3872)$ through the fireball formed in nuclear collisions at the LHC. Within a kinetic-rate equation approach as previously used for charmonia, the formation and dissociation of the $X(3872)$ is controlled by two transport parameters, i.e., its inelastic reaction rate and thermal-equilibrium limit in the evolving hot QCD medium. While the equilibrium limit is controlled by the charm production cross section in primordial nucleon-nucleon collisions (together with the spectra of charm states in the medium), the structure information is encoded in the reaction rate. We study how different scenarios for the rate affect the centrality dependence and transverse-momentum ($p_T$) spectra of the $X(3872)$. Larger reaction rates associated with the loosely bound molecule structure imply that it is formed later in the fireball evolution than the tetraquark and thus its final yields are generally smaller by around a factor of two, which is qualitatively different from most coalescence model calculations to date. The $p_T$ spectra provide further information as the later decoupling time within the molecular scenario leads to harder spectra caused by the blue-shift from the expanding fireball.
Within the transport model evaluation project (TMEP) of simulations for heavy-ion collisions, the mean-field response is examined here. Specifically, zero-sound propagation is considered for neutron-proton symmetric matter enclosed in a periodic box, at zero temperature and around normal density. The results of several transport codes belonging to two families (BUU-like and QMD-like) are compared among each other and to exact calculations. For BUU-like codes, employing the test particle method, the results depend on the combination of the number of test particles and the spread of the profile functions that weight integration over space. These parameters can be properly adapted to give a good reproduction of the analytical zero-sound features. QMD-like codes, using molecular dynamics methods, are characterized by large damping effects, attributable to the fluctuations inherent in their phase-space representation. Moreover, for a given nuclear effective interaction, they generally lead to slower density oscillations, as compared to BUU-like codes. The latter problem is mitigated in the more recent lattice formulation of some of the QMD codes. The significance of these results for the description of real heavy-ion collisions is discussed.
The longitudinal asymmetry arises in relativistic heavy ion collisions due to fluctuation in the number of participating nucleons. This asymmetry causes a shift in the center of mass rapidity of the participant zone. The rapidity shift as well as the longitudinal asymmetry have been found to be significant at the top LHC energy for collisions of identical nuclei. We study the longitudinal asymmetry and its effect on charged particle rapidity distribution and anisotropic flow parameters at relatively lower RHIC energies using a model calculation. The rapidity shift is found to be more pronounced for peripheral collisions, smaller systems and also for lower beam energies due to longitudinal asymmetry. A detailed study has been done by associating the average rapidity shift to a polynomial relation where the coefficients of this polynomial characterize the effect of the asymmetry. We show that the rapidity shift may affect observables significantly at RHIC energies.
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