arXiv subjects

Janus Weil

Publications and source records attributed to Janus Weil.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Transport Model Comparison Studies of Intermediate-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions

Transport models are the main method to obtain physics information from low to relativistic-energy heavy-ion collisions. The Transport Model Evaluation Project (TMEP) has been pursued to test the robustness of transport model predictions in reaching consistent conclusions from the same type of physical model. Calculations under controlled conditions of physical input and set-up were performed with various participating codes. These included both calculations of nuclear matter in a box with periodic boundary conditions, and more realistic calculations of heavy-ion collisions. In this intermediate review, we summarize and discuss the present status of the project. We also provide condensed descriptions of the 26 participating codes, which contributed to some part of the project. These include the major codes in use today. We review the main results of the studies completed so far. They show, that in box calculations the differences between the codes can be well understood and a convergence of the results can be reached. These studies also highlight the systematic differences between the two families of transport codes, known as BUU and QMD type codes. However, when the codes were compared in full heavy-ion collisions using different physical models, as recently for pion production, they still yielded substantially different results. This calls for further comparisons of heavy-ion collisions with controlled models and of box comparisons of important ingredients, like momentum-dependent fields, which are currently underway. We often indicate improved strategies in performing transport simulations and thus provide guidance to code developers. Results of transport simulations of heavy-ion collisions from a given code will have more significance if the code can be validated against benchmark calculations such as the ones summarized in this review.

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arXiv2018

Dilepton production and resonance properties within a new hadronic transport approach in the context of the GSI-HADES experimental data

The dilepton emission in heavy-ion reactions at low beam energies is examined within a hadronic transport approach. In this article the production of electron-positron pairs from a new approach named SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) is introduced. The dilepton emission is consistently taken into account below the hadronic threshold. The calculations are systematically confronted with HADES data in the kinetic energy range of $1 - 3.5A$ GeV for elementary, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus reactions. The present approach employing a resonance treatment based on vacuum properties is validated by an excellent agreement with experimental data up to system sizes of carbon-carbon collisions. After establishing this well-understood baseline in elementary and small systems, the significance of medium effects is investigated with a coarse-graining approach based on the same hadronic evolution. The effect of explicit in-medium modifications to the vector meson spectral functions is important for dilepton invariant mass spectra in ArKCl and larger systems, even though the transport approach with vacuum properties reveals similar features due the coupling to baryonic resonance and the intrinsically included collisional broadening. This article provides a comprehensive comparison of our calculations with published dielectron results from the HADES collaboration. In addition, the emission of dileptons is predicted in gold-gold and pion-beam experiments for which results are expected soon.

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arXiv2018

Comparison of heavy-ion transport simulations: Collision integral in a box

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.

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arXiv2016

Non-equilibrium dilepton production in hadronic transport approaches

In this work the non-equilibrium dilepton production from a hadronic transport approach (SMASH) is presented. The dilepton emission from the hadronic stage is of interest for current HADES results measured at GSI in the beam energy range from 1.25 - 3.5 GeV. Also at high collision energies (RHIC/LHC) the later dilute stages of the reaction are dominated by hadronic dynamics. The newly developed hadronic transport approach called SMASH (=Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) is introduced first. After explaining the basic interaction mechanisms, a comparison of elementary cross sections for pion production to experimental data is shown. The dilepton production within SMASH is explained in detail. The main contribution to the dilepton spectra in the low energy regime of GSI/FAIR/RHIC-BES originates from resonance decays. Results of the dilepton production with SMASH such as invariant mass spectra are shown.

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arXiv2016

Dilepton production with the SMASH model

In this work the SMASH model is presented ("Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-Interacting Hadrons"), a next-generation hadronic transport approach, which is designed to describe the non-equilibrium evolution of hadronic matter in heavy-ion collisions. We discuss first dilepton spectra obtained with SMASH in the few-GeV energy range of GSI/FAIR, where the dynamics of hadronic matter is dominated by the production and decay of various resonance states. In particular we show how electromagnetic transition form factors can emerge in a transport picture under the hypothesis of vector-meson dominance.

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arXiv2016

Understanding transport simulations of heavy-ion collisions at 100 and 400 AMeV: Comparison of heavy ion transport codes under controlled conditions

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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arXiv2015

Dilepton production and reaction dynamics in heavy-ion collisions at SIS energies from coarse-grained transport simulations

Dilepton invariant-mass spectra for heavy-ion collisions at SIS 18 and BEVALAC energies are calculated using a coarse-grained time evolution from the Ultra-relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (UrQMD) model. The coarse-graining of the microscopic simulations enables to calculate thermal dilepton emission rates by application of in-medium spectral functions from equilibrium quantum-field theoretical calculations. The results show that extremely high baryon chemical potentials dominate the evolution of the created hot and dense fireball. Consequently, a significant modification of the $ρ$ spectral shape becomes visible in the dilepton invariant-mass spectrum, resulting in an enhancement in the low-mass region $M_{ee} = 200$ to 600 MeV/$c^{2}$. This enhancement, mainly caused by baryonic effects on the $ρ$ spectral shape, can fully describe the experimentally observed excess above the hadronic cocktail contributions in Ar+KCl ($E_{\mathrm{lab}}=1.76$ $A$GeV) reactions as measured by the HADES collaboration and also gives a good explanation of the older DLS Ca+Ca ($E_{\mathrm{lab}}=1.04$ $A$GeV) data. For the larger Au+Au ($E_{\mathrm{lab}}=1.23$ $A$GeV) system, we predict an even stronger excess from our calculations. A systematic comparison of the results for different system sizes from C+C to Au+Au shows that the thermal dilepton yield increases stronger ($\propto A^{4/3}$) than the hadronic background contributions, which scale with $A$, due to its sensitivity on the time evolution of the reaction. We stress that the findings of the present work are consistent with our previous coarse-graining results for the NA60 measurements at top SPS energy. We argue that it is possible to describe the dilepton results from SIS 18 up to SPS energies by considering the modifications of the $ρ$ spectral function inside a hot and dense medium within the same model.

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arXiv2015

A coarse-graining approach for dilepton production at SPS energies

Coarse-grained output from transport calculations is used to determine thermal dilepton emission rates by applying medium-modified spectral functions from thermal quantum field theoretical models. By averaging over an ensemble of events generated with the UrQMD transport model, we extract the local thermodynamic properties at each time step of the calculation. With an equation of state the temperature $T$ and chemical potential $μ_{\mathrm{B}}$ can be determined. The approach goes beyond simplified fireball models of the bulk-medium evolution by treating the full (3+1)-dimensional expansion of the system with realistic time and density profiles. For the calculation of thermal dilepton rates we use the in-medium spectral function of the $ρ$ meson developed by Rapp and Wambach and consider thermal QGP and multi-pion contributions as well. The approach is applied to the evaluation of dimuon production in In+In collisions at top SPS energy. Comparison to the experimental results of the NA60 experiment shows good agreement of this ansatz. We find that the experimentally observed low-mass dilepton excess in the mass region from 0.2 to 0.6 GeV can be explained by a broadening of the $ρ$ spectral function with a small mass shift. In contrast, the intermediate mass region ($M > 1.5$ GeV) is dominated by a contribution from the quark-gluon plasma. These findings agree with previous calculations with fireball parametrizations. This agreement in spite of differences in the reaction dynamics between both approaches indicates that the time-integrated dilepton spectra are not very sensitive to details of the space-time evolution of the collision.

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arXiv2015

Vector Meson Spectral Functions in a Coarse-Graining Approach

Dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions at top SPS energy is investigated within a coarse-graining approach that combines an underlying microscopic evolution of the nuclear reaction with the application of medium-modified spectral functions. Extracting local energy and baryon density for a grid of small space-time cells and going to each cell's rest frame enables to determine local temperature and chemical potential by application of an equation of state. This allows for the calculation of thermal dilepton emission. We apply and compare two different spectral functions for the $ρ$: A hadronic many-body calculation and an approach that uses empirical scattering amplitudes. Quantitatively good agreement of the model calculations with the data from the NA60 collaboration is achieved for both spectral functions, but in detail the hadronic many-body approach leads to a better description, especially of the broadening around the pole mass of the $ρ$ and for the low-mass excess. We further show that the presence of a pion chemical potential significantly influences the dilepton yield.

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arXiv2015

In-medium Spectral Functions in a Coarse-Graining Approach

We use a coarse-graining approach to extract local thermodynamic properties from simulations with a microscopic transport model by averaging over a large ensemble of events. Setting up a grid of small space-time cells and going into each cell's rest frame allows to determine baryon and energy density. With help of an equation of state we get the corresponding temperature $T$ and baryon-chemical potential $μ_{\mathrm{B}}$. These results are used for the calculation of the thermal dilepton yield. We apply and compare two different spectral functions for the $ρ$ meson, firstly a calculation from hadronic many-body theory and secondly a calculation from experimental scattering amplitudes. The results obtained with our approach are compared to measurements of the NA60 Collaboration. A relatively good description of the data is achieved with both spectral functions. However, the hadronic many-body calculation is found to be closer to the experimental data with regard to the in-medium broadening of the spectral shape.

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arXiv2014

Dilepton Production in Transport-based Approaches

We investigate dilepton production in transport-based approaches and show that the baryon couplings of the $ρ$ meson represent the most important ingredient for understanding the measured dilepton spectra. At SIS energies, the baryon resonances naturally play a major role and affect already the vacuum spectra via Dalitz-like contributions, which can be captured well in transport simulations. Recent pion-beam measurements at GSI will help to constrain the properties of the involved resonances further.

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arXiv2014

Dilepton Production in Transport-based Approaches

We investigate dilepton production in transport-based approaches and show that the baryon couplings of the $ρ$ meson represent the most important ingredient for understanding the measured dilepton spectra. At low energies (of a few GeV), the baryon resonances naturally play a larger role and affect already the vacuum spectra via Dalitz-like contributions, which can be captured well in an on-shell-transport scheme. At higher energies, the baryons mostly affect the in-medium self energy of the $ρ$, which is harder to tackle in transport models and requires advanced techniques.

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arXiv2013

Dilepton Production in Transport Calculations and Coarse-Grained Dynamics

We present transport calculations with the Ultra-relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics approach (UrQMD) for dilepton spectra at SIS energies. While we obtain a good agreement with experiment for elementary reactions, in heavy-ion collisions an excess in the invariant mass spectra is observed which cannot be described by the model. As the pure transport calculations do not include any in-medium effects and are limited to hadronic degrees of freedom, we present an alternative approach that uses coarse-grained output from transport calculations to determine thermal dilepton emission rates. For this we apply the medium-modified $ρ$ spectral function by Eletsky et al. In a first exemplary comparison to data from the NA60 experiment we find that the coarse-graining approach gives reasonable results.

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arXiv2013

Investigating in-medium properties of the $ω$ meson via the $ω\rightarrowπ^0γ$ decay

We investigate the feasibility of studying in-medium properties of the $ω$ meson in photoproduction experiments via the decay $ω\rightarrowπ^0γ$. We use the GiBUU transport model to compare different methods of obtaining in-medium information, such as the invariant mass spectrum, transparency ratio, excitation function and momentum spectrum. We show that the final-state interaction of the pion poses a major obstacle for the interpretation of the invariant mass spectrum. The other three observables turn out to be fairly independent of final-state interactions and thus can give access to the $ω$'s in-medium properties.

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arXiv2012

Dilepton production at SIS energies with the GiBUU transport model

We present dilepton spectra from nucleus-nucleus collisions at SIS energies, which were simulated with the GiBUU transport model in a resonance-model approach. These spectra are compared to the data published by the HADES collaboration. We argue that the interpretation of dilepton spectra at SIS energies critically depends on the couplings between the ρ meson and the baryonic resonances.

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arXiv2012

Dilepton production in proton-induced reactions at SIS energies with the GiBUU transport model

We present dilepton spectra from p+p, d+p and p+Nb reactions at SIS energies, which were simulated with the GiBUU transport model in a resonance model approach. These spectra are compared to the data published by the HADES and DLS collaborations. It is shown that the $ρ$ spectral function includes non-trivial effects already in elementary reactions, due to production via baryon resonances, which can yield large contributions to the dilepton spectrum. Dilepton spectra from nuclear reactions in the energy range of the HADES experiment are thus found to be sensitive also to properties of nucleon resonances in the nuclear medium.

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arXiv2011

Experimental approaches for determining in-medium properties of hadrons from photo-nuclear reactions

Properties of hadrons and their modification within strongly interacting matter provide a link between experimental observables and Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in the non-perturbative sector. The sensitivity of various observables to in-medium modifications of mesons is discussed. The transparency ratio, comparing the meson yield per nucleon within a nucleus relative to that on a free nucleon, is related to the in-medium width of the meson. While the transparency ratio can be determined for any meson lifetime the meson line shape only contains information on in-medium properties if the meson is so short-lived that it decays in the medium after production in a nuclear reaction. Light vector mesons are thus particularly suited for these investigations. The momentum distribution of mesons produced in a photo-nuclear reaction as well as the excitation function also show some sensitivity to different in-medium modification scenarios. As an example, high statistics data taken at MAMI-C on the photoproduction of \omega\ mesons are presented.

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arXiv2011

In-Medium Properties of Vector Mesons in a Transport Approach

We present dilepton spectra from p+p and p+Nb collisions at a kinetic beam energy of 3.5 GeV, which were simulated with the GiBUU transport model assuming different in-medium scenarios. We compare these spectra to preliminary HADES data and show that GiBUU can describe the data reasonably well. Our simulations indicate that the intermediate dilepton-mass region is sensitive to the N-Delta electromagnetic transition form factor, which up to now is unmeasured in the time-like region.

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