arXiv subjects

Hannah Elfner

Publications and source records attributed to Hannah Elfner.

63 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Cross-conductivity: novel transport coefficients to constrain the hadronic degrees of freedom of nuclear matter

In general, the constituents of the bulk matter produced in heavy-ion collisions carry, besides electric charge, multiple other conserved quantum numbers like baryon number and strangeness. Therefore, an electric field will not only generate an electric current but, at the same time, also currents in baryon number and strangeness. We propose that the impact of the electric field on these conserved currents should be characterized by additional transport coefficients, which we call cross-conductivities. In this paper, we introduce and present a calculation of these cross-conductivities from the Green-Kubo formalism within the transport code SMASH for different chemical compositions of hadron resonance gases. We find that the coefficients underlie an ordering in the active degrees of freedom and that thus the chemical composition of the system plays a crucial role. Further, we argue that in future comparisons of lattice QCD calculations with these findings, one could constrain which degrees of freedom and their corresponding charge properties are relevant for the QCD dynamics of the system.

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arXiv2019

Constraining resonance properties through kaon production in pion-nucleus collisions at low energies

Hadronic interactions are crucial for the dynamical description of heavy-ion reactions at low collision energies and in the late dilute stages at high collision energies. In particular, the properties and decay channels of resonances are an essential ingredient of hadronic transport approaches. The HADES collaboration measured particle production in collisions of pions with carbon and tungsten nuclei at $E_\text{kin} = 1.7\,\text{GeV}$. Such reactions are of high interest, because they allow to probe the properties of baryonic resonances produced in a much cleaner environment than the usual nucleus-nucleus collisions. We study these reactions with two transport approaches: SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) and UrQMD (Ultra relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics) which follow the same underlying concept but with different implementations. The differential spectra in rapidity and transverse momentum are used to show how model parameters, as the decay channels of high mass resonances and angular distributions of kaon elastic scattering, can be constrained. It is found that the data favor the production of more particles with lower momentum over the production of few particles with higher momentum in these decays. In addition, the shape of the rapidity distribution of the kaons strongly depends on the angular distribution of the elastic kaon-nucleon cross section.

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arXiv2019

Influence of the neutron-skin effect on nuclear isobar collisions at RHIC

The unambiguous observation of a Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME)-driven charge separation is the core aim of the isobar program at RHIC consisting of ${^{96}_{40}}$Zr+${^{96}_{40}}$Zr and ${^{96}_{44}}$Ru+${^{96}_{44}}$Ru collisions at $\sqrt {s_{\rm NN}}\!=\!200$ GeV. We quantify the role of the spatial distributions of the nucleons in the isobars on both eccentricity and magnetic field strength within a relativistic hadronic transport approach (SMASH, Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). In particular, we introduce isospin-dependent nucleon-nucleon spatial correlations in the geometric description of both nuclei, deformation for ${^{96}_{44}}$Ru and the so-called neutron skin effect for the neutron-rich isobar i.e. ${^{96}_{40}}$Zr. The main result of this study is a reduction of the magnetic field strength difference between ${^{96}_{44}}$Ru+${^{96}_{44}}$Ru and ${^{96}_{40}}$Zr+${^{96}_{40}}$Zr by a factor of 2, from $10\%$ to $5\%$ in peripheral collisions when the neutron-skin effect is included. Further, we find an increase of eccentricity by up to 10$\%$ when deformation is taken into account while neither the neutron skin effect nor the nucleon-nucleon correlations result into a significant modification of this observable with respect to the traditional Woods-Saxon modeling. Our results suggest a significantly smaller CME signal to background ratio for the experimental charge separation measurement in peripheral collisions with the isobar systems than previously expected.

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arXiv2019

Jet quenching in the hadron gas: an exploratory study

The suppression of high momentum particles in heavy-ion collisions in comparison to elementary reactions is one of the main indications for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma. In recent studies, full jets are being reconstructed and substructure observables are gaining importance in assessing the medium modifications of hard probes. In this work, the effect of the late stage hadronic interactions are explored within the hadronic transport approach SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). High momentum particles are incorporated in a radially expanding hadron gas to analyse the corresponding angular distributions, also refered to as `jet shape' observables. We find that the full hadron gas can be approximated with a pion gas with constant elastic cross-sections of 100 mb. In addition, the temperature and probe energy dependence of diffusion coefficients $\tilde{q}$ and $\tilde{e}$ quantifying the transverse and parallel momentum transfers are extracted. The species dependence and the importance of different interaction types are investigated. Parametrizations are presented that can be employed in future jet quenching calculations to include the effect of the hadronic phase.

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arXiv2019

Comparison of heavy-ion transport simulations: Collision integral with pions and $Δ$ resonances in a box

We compare ten transport codes for a system confined in a box, aiming at improved handling of the production of $Δ$ resonances and pions, which is indispensable for constraining high-density symmetry energy from observables such as the $π^-/π^+$ 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 $NN\leftrightarrow NΔ$ and $Δ\leftrightarrow Nπ$ 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 $Δ$ and $π$, 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 $Δ$ and $π$. 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 $π^-/π^+$ ratio for the system initialized at n/p = 1.5, after letting the existing $Δ$ 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.

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arXiv2019

Benchmarking a Non-Equilibrium Approach to Photon Emission in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

In this work, the production of photons through binary scattering processes is investigated for equilibrated hadronic systems. More precisely, a non-equilibrium hadronic transport approach to describe relativistic heavy-ion collisions is benchmarked with respect to photon emission. Cross sections for photon production in $π+ ρ\to π+ γ$ and $π+ π\to ρ+ γ$ scattering processes are derived from an effective chiral field theory and implemented into the hadronic transport approach, SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). The implementation is verified by systematically comparing the thermal photon rate to theoretical expectations. Further, the impact of form factors is discussed, scattering processes mediated by $ω$ mesons are found to contribute significantly to the total photon production. Several comparisons of the yielded photon rates are performed: to parametrizations of the very same rates, as used in hydrodynamic simulations, to previous works relying on different cross sections for the production of direct photons from the hadronic stage, and to partonic rates. Finally, the impact of considering the finite width of the $ρ$ meson is investigated, where a significant enhancement of photon production in the low-energy region is observed. This benchmark is the first step towards a consistent treatment of photon emission in hybrid hydrodynamics+transport approaches and a genuine dynamical description.

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arXiv2019

Electrical conductivity and relaxation via colored noise in a hadronic gas

Motivated by the theory of relativistic hydrodynamic fluctuations we make use of the Green-Kubo formula to compute the electrical conductivity and the (second-order) relaxation time of the electric current of an interacting hadron gas. We use the recently developed transport code SMASH to numerically solve the coupled set of Boltzmann equations implementing realistic hadronic interactions. In particular, we explore the role of the resonance lifetimes in the determination of the electrical relaxation time. As opposed to a previous calculation of the shear viscosity we observe that the presence of resonances with lifetimes of the order of the mean-free time does not appreciably affect the relaxation of the electric current fluctuations. We compare our results to other approaches describing similar systems, and provide the value of the electrical conductivity and the relaxation time for a hadron gas at temperatures between T=60 MeV and T=150 MeV.

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arXiv2019

Deuterons at LHC: "snowballs in hell" via hydrodynamics and hadronic afterburner

The deuteron yield in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV is consistent with thermal production at a freeze-out temperature of $T = 155$ MeV. The existence of deuterons with binding energy of 2.2 MeV at this temperature was described as "snowballs in hell". We provide a microscopic explanation of this phenomenon, utilizing relativistic hydrodynamics and switching to a hadronic afterburner at the above mentioned temperature of $T = 155$ MeV. The measured deuteron $p_T$-spectra and coalescence parameter $B_2(p_T)$ are reproduced without free parameters, only by implementing experimentally known cross-sections of deuteron reactions with hadrons, most importantly $πd \leftrightarrow πn p$.

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arXiv2018

Centrality dependence of deuteron production in Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV via hydrodynamics and hadronic afterburner

The deuteron binding energy is only 2.2 MeV. At the same time, its yield in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = $2.76 TeV corresponds to a thermal yield at the temperature around 155 MeV, which is too hot to keep deuterons bound. This puzzle is not completely resolved yet. In general, the mechanism of light nuclei production in ultra-high energy heavy ion collisions remains under debate. In a previous work [1] we suggest a microscopic explanation of the deuteron production in central ultra-relativistic Pb+Pb collisions, the main mechanism being $πpn \leftrightarrow πd$ reactions in the hadronic phase of the collision. We use a state-of-the-art hybrid approach, combining relativistic hydrodynamics for the hot and dense stage and hadronic transport for a later, more dilute stage. Deuteron rescattering in the hadronic stage is implemented explicitly, using its experimentally measured vacuum cross-sections. In these proceedings we extend our previous work to non-central collisions, keeping exactly the same methodology and parameters. We find that our approach leads to a good description of the measured deuteron transverse momentum spectra at centralities up to 40%, and underestimates the amount of deuterons at low transverse momentum at higher centralities. Nevertheless, the coalescence parameter $B_2$, measured by ALICE collaboration, is reproduced well in our approach even for peripheral collisions.

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