arXiv subjects

Juan M. Torres-Rincon

Publications and source records attributed to Juan M. Torres-Rincon.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Chiral symmetry restoration with three chiral partners

I discuss the masses of chiral partners in the context of chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature. Using the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model I first remind the usual situation where two mesons of opposed parity become degenerate above the chiral transition temperature. Then I consider an effective theory for D mesons where the positive parity companion presents a "double pole structure". In this case three different masses need to be analyzed as functions of the temperature. I suggest a possible restoration pattern at high temperatures when the back-reaction of the quark condensate is incorporated.

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arXiv2021

"Smashing more than two": Deuteron production in relativistic heavy ion collisions via stochastic multi-particle reactions

We study the deuteron production via the deuteron pion and nucleon catalysis reactions, $πp n \leftrightarrow πd$ and $N p n \leftrightarrow N d$, by employing stochastic multi-particle reactions in the hadronic transport approach SMASH for the first time. This is an improvement compared to previous studies, which introduced an artificial fake resonance $d'$ to simulate these $3 \leftrightarrow 2$ reactions as a chain of $2\leftrightarrow 2$ reactions. The derivation of the stochastic criterion for multi-particle reactions is presented in a comprehensive fashion and its implementation is tested against an analytic expression for the scattering rate and the equilibrating particle yields in box calculations. We then study Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}} = 7.7$ GeV, where we find that multi-particle collisions substantially reduce the time required for deuterons to reach partial chemical equilibrium with nucleons. Subsequently, the final yield of $d$ is practically independent from the number of $d$ at particlization, confirming the results of previous studies. The mean transverse momentum and the integrated elliptic flow as a function of centrality are rather insensitive to the exact realization of the $2\leftrightarrow 3$ reactions.

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arXiv2021

Finite-temperature effects on D-meson properties

We study the spectroscopy and transport properties of charmed mesons in a thermal medium by applying an effective field theory based on chiral and heavy-quark symmetries in the imaginary time formalism. Relying on unitarity constraints and self-consistency we extract the in-medium properties (masses and widths) of $D$ and $D_s$ mesons and their interactions with light hadrons. We report our findings on 1) dynamically generated states, 2) thermal evolution of chiral partners, 3) in-medium scattering amplitudes, and 4) transport coefficients below the chiral restoration temperature.

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arXiv2021

Pionic depth of the hadron gas after a heavy-ion collision

The final stage of a relativistic heavy-ion collision is a hadron gas. Final-state interactions therein distort the $p_T$ spectrum of particles coming from the phase transition upon cooling the quark-gluon plasma. Using recent state-of-the-art parametrizations of pion interactions we provide theoretical computations of the pionic depth of the gas: how likely is it that a given pion rescatters in it (we find a high probability around $p_T=0.5$ GeV at midrapidity, corresponding to the formation of the $ρ$ resonance), a comparison of the collision and Bjorken expansion rates, and how many pions make it through without interacting as a function of $p_T$. This is in the range 10-24$\%$ and shown in this plot, the main result of the contribution.

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arXiv2021

Degeneracy patterns of chiral companions at finite temperature

Chiral symmetry represents a fundamental concept lying at the core of particle and nuclear physics. Its spontaneous breaking in vacuum can be exploited to distinguish chiral hadronic partners, whose masses differ. In fact, the features of this breaking serve as guiding principles for the construction of effective approaches of QCD at low energies, e.g., the chiral perturbation theory, the linear sigma model, the (Polyakov)--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model, etc. At high temperatures/densities chiral symmetry can be restored bringing the chiral partners to be nearly degenerated in mass. At vanishing baryochemical potential, such restoration follows a smooth transition, and the chiral companions reach this degeneration above the transition temperature. In this work I review how different realizations of chiral partner degeneracy arise in different effective theories/models of QCD. I distinguish the cases where the chiral states are either fundamental degrees of freedom or (dynamically-generated) composed states. In particular, I discuss the intriguing case in which chiral symmetry restoration involves more than two chiral partners, recently addressed in the literature.

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arXiv2021

Temperature dependence of the properties of open heavy-flavor mesons

We address the modification of open heavy-flavor mesons in a hot medium of light mesons within an effective theory approach consistent with chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries and the use of the imaginary time formalism to introduce the non-zero temperature effects to the theory. The unitarized scattering amplitudes, the ground-state self-energies and the corresponding spectral functions are calculated self-consistently. We use the thermal ground-state spectral functions obtained with this methodology to further calculate 1) open-charm meson Euclidean correlators, and 2) off-shell transport coefficients in the hadronic phase.

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arXiv2021

The role of proton-antiproton regeneration in the late stages of heavy-ion collisions

We investigate the long-standing question of the effect of proton-antiproton annihilation on the (anti-)proton yield, while respecting detailed balance for the 5-body back-reaction for the first time in a full microscopic description of the late stages of heavy-ion collisions. This is achieved by employing a stochastic collision criterion in a hadronic transport approach (SMASH), which allows to treat arbitrary multi-particle reactions. It is used to account for the regeneration of (anti-)protons via $5π\rightarrow p\bar{p}$. Our results show that a back-reaction happens for a fraction of 15-20\% of all annihilations. Within a viscous hybrid approach Au+Au/Pb+Pb collisions from $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=17.3$ GeV$-5.02$ TeV are investigated and the quoted fraction is independent of the beam energy or centrality of the collision. Taking the back-reaction into account results in regeneration of half of the (anti-)proton yield that is lost due to annihilations at midrapidity. We also find that, concerning the multiplicities, treating the back-reaction as a chain of 2-body reactions is equivalent to a single 5-to-2 reaction.

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arXiv2021

Chiral kinetic theory with small mass corrections and quantum coherent states

We study the effect of a small fermion mass in the formulation of the on-shell effective field theory (OSEFT). This is our starting point to derive small mass corrections to the chiral kinetic theory. In the massless case, only four Wigner functions are needed to describe positive and negative energy fermions of left and right chirality, corresponding to the vectorial components of a fermionic two-point Green's function. As soon as mass correction are introduced, tensorial components are also needed, while the scalar components strictly vanish in the OSEFT. The tensorial components are conveniently parametrized in the so-called spin coherence function, which describe quantum coherent mixtures of left-right and right-left chiral fermions, of either positive or negative energy. We show that, up to second order in the energy expansion, vectorial and tensorial components are decoupled, and obey the same dispersion law and transport equation, depending on their respective chirality. We study the mass modifications of the reparametrization invariance of the OSEFT, and check that vector and tensorial components are related by the associated symmetry transformations. We study how the macroscopic properties of the system are described in terms of the whole set of Wigner functions, and check that our framework allows to account for the mass modifications to the chiral anomaly equation.

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arXiv2020

Pseudoscalar and vector open-charm mesons at finite temperature

Vacuum and thermal properties of pseudoscalar and vector charm mesons are analyzed within a self-consistent many-body approach, employing a chiral effective field theory that incorporates heavy-quark spin symmetry. Upon unitarization of the vacuum interaction amplitudes for the scattering of charm mesons off light mesons in a fully coupled-channel basis, new dynamically generated states are searched. The imaginary-time formalism is employed to extend the calculation to finite temperatures up to $T=150$ MeV. Medium-modified spectral shapes of the $D$, $D^*$, $D_s$ and $D_s^*$ mesons are provided. The temperature dependence of the masses and decay widths of the nonstrange $D_0^*$ (2300) and $D_1^*$(2430) mesons, both showing a double-pole structure in the complex-energy plane, is also reported, as well as that of the $D_{s0}^*$(2317) and $D_{s1}^*$(2460) resonances and other states not yet identified experimentally. Being the first calculation incorporating open-charm vector mesons at finite temperature in a self-consistent fashion, it brings up the opportunity to discuss the medium effects on the open charm sector under the perspective of chiral and heavy-quark spin symmetries.

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arXiv2020

Light-nuclei production and search for the QCD critical point

We discuss the potential of light-nuclei measurement in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies for the search of the hypothetical QCD critical end-point. A previous proposal based on neutron density fluctuations has brought appealing experimental evidences of a maximum in a ratio involving tritons, protons and deuterons, ${\cal O}_{tpd}$. However these results are difficult to reconcile with the state-of-the-art statistical thermal model predictions. Based on the idea that the QCD critical point can lead to a substantial attraction among nucleons, we propose new ratios involving $^4$He in which the maximum would be more evident. We argue that the experimental extraction is feasible by presenting actual measurements at low and high collision energies. We also illustrate the possible behavior of these ratios at intermediate energies applying the semiclassical method based on flucton paths using preliminary STAR data for ${\cal O}_{tpd}$.

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arXiv2020

Impact of a thermal medium on $D$ mesons and their chiral partners

We study $D$ and $D_s$ mesons at finite temperature using an effective field theory based on chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries within the imaginary-time formalism. Interactions with the light degrees of freedom are unitarized via a Bethe-Salpeter approach, and the $D$ and $D_s$ self-energies are calculated self-consistently. We generate dynamically the $D^*_0(2300)$ and $D_s(2317)$ states, and study their possible identification as the chiral partners of the $D$ and $D_s$ ground states, respectively. We show the evolution of their masses and decay widths as functions of temperature, and provide an analysis of the chiral-symmetry restoration in the heavy-flavor sector below the transition temperature. In particular, we analyse the very special case of the $D$-meson, for which the chiral partner is associated to the double-pole structure of the $D^*_0(2300)$.

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arXiv2020

Baryon preclustering at the freeze-out of heavy-ion collisions and light-nuclei production

Following the idea of nucleon clustering and light-nuclei production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions close to the QCD critical-end point, we address the quantum effects affecting the interaction of several nucleons at finite temperature. For this aim we use the $K$-harmonics method to four-nucleon states ($α$ particle), and also develop a novel semiclassical "flucton" method at finite temperature, based on certain classical paths in Euclidean time, and apply it to two- and four-particle configurations. To study possible effects on the light-nuclei production close to the QCD critical point, we also made such calculations with modified internuclear potentials. For heavy-ion experiments, we propose new measurements of light-nuclei multiplicity ratios which may show enhancements due to baryon preclustering. We point out the special role of the $\mathcal{O}(50)$ four-nucleon excitations of $α$-particle, feeding into the final multiplicities of $d,t$, $^3$He and $^4$He, and propose to directly look for their two-body decays.

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arXiv2020

A Non-Equilibrium Approach to Photon Emission from the Late Stages of Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Cross sections for photon production in hadronic scattering processes have been calculated according to an effective chiral field theory. For $π+ ρ\to π+ γ$ and $π+ π\to ρ+ γ$ processes, these cross sections have been implemented into a novel hadronic transport approach (SMASH), which is suitable for collisions at low and intermediate energies. The implementation is verified by systematically comparing the thermal photon rate to theoretical expectations. The photon rates we obtain are compared to previous works, where scattering processes mediated by $ω$ mesons are found to contribute significantly to the total photon production. Finally, the impact of considering the finite width of the $ρ$ meson is investigated, and a significant enhancement of photon production in the low-energy region is observed. This work is the first step towards a consistent treatment of photon emission in hybrid hydrodynamics+transport approaches. The quantification of the importance of the hadronic stage for the resolution of the direct photon flow puzzle is a next step and can be applied to identify equilibrium and non-equilibrium effects in the hadronic afterburner.

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arXiv2020

Chiral kinetic theory from the on-shell effective theory: derivation of collision terms

We show that the on-shell effective theory (OSEFT) is the quantum field theory counterpart of a Foldy-Wouthuysen diagonalization of relativistic quantum mechanics for massless fermions. Thus, it is free of the Zitterbewegung oscillations that would yield an ill-defined meaning to the semiclassical transport approach at short distances if derived from the pure Dirac picture. We present a detailed derivation of the collision terms in the chiral kinetic theory using the OSEFT. Collision integrals are derived up to order 1/E, where E is the energy of an on-shell fermion. At this order, the collision terms depends on the spin tensor of the fermion, and in the presence of chiral imbalance, it describes how a massless fermion of a given helicity interacts differently with the transverse photons of different circular polarization. In order to back up our results, we check that they allow us to reproduce the fermion decay rate in an ultradegenerate plasma with a chiral imbalance computed directly from QED.

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arXiv2019

Nuclear correlations and modifications of the nucleon-nucleon potential due to the QCD critical mode

The scalar-isoscalar mode of QCD becomes lighter/nearly massless close to the chiral transition/second-order critical point. From nuclear physics we know that this mode is the main responsible for the attractive part of the nucleon-nucleon potential at inter-particle distances of 1-2 fm. Therefore one expects that close to the critical point there is a long-range strong attraction among nucleons. Using a Walecka-Serot model for the NN potential we study the effects of the critical point in a finite system of nucleons and mesons by solving classical Molecular Dynamics+Langevin equations for the freeze-out conditions of heavy-ion collisions. Going beyond the mean-field approximation allows us to account for strong nucleon correlations in the time evolution, leading to baryon clustering. We observe that light cluster formation, together with an enhancement of higher-order cumulants of the proton distribution can signal the presence of the critical point.

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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

Elliptic flow and $R_{AA}$ of D mesons at FAIR comparing the UrQMD hybrid model and the coarse-graining approach

We present a study of the elliptic flow and $R_{AA}$ of D and anti-D mesons in Au+Au collisions at FAIR energies. We propagate the charm quarks and the D mesons following a previously applied Langevin dynamics. The evolution of the background medium is modeled in two different ways: (I) we use the UrQMD hydrodynamics + Boltzmann transport hybrid approach including a phase transition to QGP and (II) with the coarse-graining approach employing also an equation of state with QGP. The latter approach has previously been used to describe di-lepton data at various energies very successfully. This comparison allows us to explore the effects of partial thermalization and viscous effects on the charm propagation. We explore the centrality dependencies of the collisions, the variation of the decoupling temperature and various hadronization parameters. We find that the initial partonic phase is responsible for the creation of most of the D mesons elliptic flow and that the subsequent hadronic interactions seem to play only a minor role. This indicates that D mesons elliptic flow is a smoking gun for a partonic phase at FAIR energies. However, the results suggest that the magnitude and the details of the elliptic flow strongly depend on the dynamics of the medium and on the hadronization procedure, which is related to the medium properties as well. Therefore, even at FAIR energies the charm quark might constitute a very useful tool to probe the Quark-Gluon Plasma and investigate its physics.

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