arXiv subjects

Frédérique Grassi

Publications and source records attributed to Frédérique Grassi.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Nuclear Physics Confronts Relativistic Collisions Of Isobars

High-energy collisions involving the $A=96$ isobars $^{96}$Zr and $^{96}$Ru have been performed in 2018 at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) as a means to search for the chiral magnetic effect in QCD. This would manifest itself as specific deviations from unity in the ratio of observables taken between $^{96}$Zr+$^{96}$Zr and $^{96}$Ru+$^{96}$Ru collisions. Measurements of such ratios (released at the end of 2021) indeed reveal deviations from unity, but these are primarily caused by the two collided isobars having different radial profiles and intrinsic deformations. To make progress in understanding RHIC data, nuclear physicists across the energy spectrum gathered in Heidelberg in 2022 as part of an EMMI Rapid Reaction Task Force (RRTF) to address the following question. Does the combined effort of low-energy nuclear structure physics and high-energy heavy-ion physics enable us to understand the observations made in isobar collisions at RHIC?

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arXiv2025

Predictions for flow harmonic distributions and flow factorization ratios at RHIC

Data obtained at RHIC can be reproduced with relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations by adjusting the viscosity and initial conditions but it is difficult to disentangle these quantities. It is therefore important to find orthogonal observables to constrain the initial conditions separately from the viscosity. New observables have been measured at the LHC and shown to be sensitive to initial conditions and less to medium properties, specifically factorization breaking ratios appears to be promising. Here we consider two initial condition models, NeXus and TRENTO. While both models yield similar results for the scaled flow harmonic distributions both at the LHC and RHIC, they lead to quantitatively much more different patterns for the factorization breaking ratios at RHIC than at LHC, due to the shorter lifetime. Additionally, not only final state interactions but also initial free streaming matter in these ratio predictions and differences between these are enhanced at RHIC compared to LHC. Therefore experimental factorization breaking ratios at RHIC top energy (for transverse momentum) would be interesting to get.

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arXiv2024

Impact of the pre-equilibrium phase for the determination of nuclear geometry in high-energy isobar collisions

Ultrarelativistic isobar collisions have been proposed as a useful tool to investigate nuclear structure. These systems are not created in equilibrium, rather undergo a pre-thermalization stage. In this stage, some of the initial structure information may be lost and additional effects introduced. The objective of this paper is to study this possibility in the extreme case of a "free-streaming" pre-equilibrium stage. We do this by computing estimators for ratios of various measured (or measurable) quantities (elliptic and triangular flows, mean transverse momentum and associated cumulants, correlators between elliptic or triangular flows and mean transverse momentum, symmetric cumulant and two-plane correlator) and study their sensitivity to the duration of the free-streaming stage. We find that the correlators between elliptic or triangular flows and mean transverse momentum, the so-called $ρ_2$ and $ρ_3$, are indeed sensitive to the duration of the free-streaming stage and that the normalized symmetric cumulant, $\varepsilon NSC(2,3)$ might also depend on this duration.

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arXiv2020

$p_T$-dependent multiplicity fluctuations from PCA and initial conditions

We present a Principal Component Analysis for a hydrodynamic simulation and compare with CMS experimental data. While the results are reasonable for anisotropic flow, for multiplicity fluctuations they are qualitatively different. We argue that this is due to too large transverse momentum ($p_T$) fluctuations and $N-p_T$ covariance in the simulation than seen experimentally. In turn this is related to too large initial size fluctuations.

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arXiv2019

$p_T$-Dependent Particle Number Fluctuations From Principal Component Analyses in Hydrodynamic Simulations of Heavy-Ion Collisions

We carry out a principal component analysis of fluctuations in a hydrodynamic simulation of heavy-ion collisions, and compare with experimental data from the CMS collaboration. The leading and subleading principal components of elliptic and triangular flow reproduce the trends seen in data. By contrast, the principal components of multiplicity fluctuations show an interesting difference in their $p_T$ dependence for simulations compared to experimental data. Specifically, the leading component increases with $p_T$ in hydrodynamics, while it is constant in experiment. In order to understand how the leading and subleading modes arise, we construct a toy model where the principal components have a simple analytic form. We show how the PCA components depend on fluctuations of the average transverse momentum and of the total multiplicity, as well as correlations between the two, and we verify that hydrodynamic simulations agree with the predictions of the toy model. The difference in the momentum trend is likely due to the fact that hydrodynamic models typically have transverse momentum fluctuations that are larger than seen experimentally.

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arXiv2019

Bulk quantities in nuclear collisions from running coupling $k_{T}$-factorization and hybrid simulations

Starting from a Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework, based on a running-coupling improved $k_T$-factorized formula, we calculate bulk observables in several heavy-ion collision systems. This is done in two ways: first we calculate the particle distribution directly implied from the CGC model, and we compare this to the case where it is instead used as initial conditions for a hybrid hydrodynamic simulation. In this way, we can assess the effects of hydrodynamic and hadronic evolution by quantifying how much they change the results from a pure initial state approach and, therefore, to what extent initial condition models can be directly compared to experimental data. We find that entropy production in subsequent hydrodynamic evolution can increase multiplicity by as much as 50\%. However, disregarding a single overall normalization factor, the centrality, energy, and system size dependence of charged hadron multiplicity is only affected at the $\sim$5\% level. Because of this, the parameter-free prediction for these dependencies gives reasonable agreement with experimental data whether or not hydrodynamic evolution is included. On the other hand, our model results are not compatible with the hypothesis that hydrodynamic evolution is present in large systems, but not small systems like p-Pb, in which case the dependence of multiplicity on system size would be stronger than seen experimentally. Moreover, we find that hydrodynamic evolution significantly changes the distribution of momentum, so that observables such as mean transverse momentum are very different from the initial particle production, and much closer to measured data. Finally, we find that a good agreement to anisotropic flow data cannot be achieved due to the large eccentricity generated by this model.

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arXiv2018

Probing the transverse size of initial inhomogeneities with flow observables

Disentangling the effect of initial conditions and medium properties is an open question in the field of relativistic heavy ion collisions. We argue that, while one can study the impact of initial inhomogeneities by varying their size, it is important to maintain the global properties fixed. We present a method to do this. We show that many observables are insensitive to the the hot spot sizes, including integrated vn, scaled distributions of vn, symmetric cumulants, eventplane correlations, and differential vn(pT ). We find however that the factorization breaking ratio rn and sub-leading component in a Principal Component Analysis are more sensitive to the initial granularity and can be used to probe short-scale features of the initial density.

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arXiv2014

Viscous Effects on the Mapping of the Initial to Final State in Heavy Ion Collisions

We investigate the correlation between various aspects of the initial geometry of heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider energies and the final anisotropic flow, using v-USPhydro, a 2+1 event-by-event viscous relativistic hydrodynamical model. We test the extent of which shear and bulk viscosity affect the prediction of the final flow harmonics, $v_n$, from the initial eccentricities, $\varepsilon_n$. We investigate in detail the flow harmonics $v_1$ through $v_5$ where we find that $v_1$, $v_4$, and $v_5$ are dependent on more complicated aspects of the initial geometry that are especially important for the description of peripheral collisions, including a non-linear dependence on eccentricities as well as a dependence on shorter-scale features of the initial density. Furthermore, we compare our results to previous results from NeXSPheRIO, a 3+1 relativistic ideal hydrodynamical model that has a non-zero initial flow contribution, and find that the combined contribution from 3+1 dynamics and non-zero, fluctuating initial flow decreases the predictive ability of the initial eccentricities, in particular for very peripheral collisions, but also disproportionately in central collisions.

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arXiv2007

NeXSPheRIO Results on Elliptic-Flow Fluctuations at RHIC

By using the NexSPheRIO code, we study the elliptic-flow fluctuations in Au+Au collisions at 200A GeV. It is shown that, by fixing the parameters of the model to correctly reproduce the charged pseudo-rapidity and the transverse-momentum distributions, reasonable agreement of with data is obtained, both as function of pseudo-rapidity as well as of transverse momentum, for charged particles. Our results on elliptic-flow fluctuations are in good agreement with the recently measured data in experiments.

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