arXiv subjects

M. Bleicher

Publications and source records attributed to M. Bleicher.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Formation of hypermatter and hypernuclei within transport models in relativistic ion collisions

Within a combined approach we investigate the main features of the production of hyper-fragments in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The formation of hyperons is modelled within the UrQMD and HSD transport codes. To describe the hyperon capture by nucleons and nuclear residues a coalescence of baryons (CB) model was developed. We demonstrate that the origin of hypernuclei of various masses can be explained by typical baryon interactions, and that it is similar to processes leading to the production of conventional nuclei. At high beam energies we predict a saturation of the yields of all hyper-fragments, therefore, this kind of reactions can be studied with high yields even at the accelerators of moderate relativistic energies.

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arXiv2014

Centrality dependence of hadronization and chemical freeze-out conditions in heavy ion collisions at \sqrt s_{NN} = 2.76 TeV

We present an analysis of hadronic multiplicities measured in Pb-Pb collisions at \sqrt s_{NN} = 2.76 TeV as a function of the collision centrality within the statistical hadronization model. Evidence is found of a dependence of the chemical freeze-out temperature as a function of centrality, with a slow rise from central to peripheral collisions, which we interpret as an effect of post-hadronization inelastic scatterings. Using correction factors calculated by means of a simulation based on the UrQMD model, we are able to obtain a significant improvement in the statitical model fit quality and to reconstruct the primordial chemical equilibrium configuration. This is characterized by a nearly constant temperature of about 164 MeV which we interpret as the actual hadronization temperature.

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arXiv2014

Collisional processes of on-shell and off-shell heavy quarks in vacuum and in the Quark-Gluon-Plasma

We study the heavy quark scattering on partons of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) being especially interested in the collisional (elastic) scattering processes of heavy quarks on quarks and gluons. We calculate the different cross sections for perturbative partons (massless on-shell particles in the vacuum) and for dynamical quasi-particles (off-shell particles in the QGP medium as described by the dynamical quasi-particles model "DQPM") using the leading order Born diagrams. Our results show clearly the effect of a finite parton mass and width on the perturbative elastic $(q(g) Q \rightarrow q (g) Q)$ cross sections which depend on temperature $T$, energy density $ε$, the invariant energy $\sqrt{s}$ and the scattering angle $θ$. Our detailed comparisons demonstrate that the finite width of the quasi-particles in the DQPM - which encodes the multiple partonic scattering - has little influence on the cross section for $q Q \rightarrow q Q$ as well as $g Q \rightarrow g Q$ scattering except close to thresholds. Thus when studying the dynamics of energetic heavy quarks in a QGP medium the spectral width of the degrees-of-freedom may be discarded. We have, furthermore, compared the cross sections from the DQPM with corresponding results from hard-thermal-loop (HTL) approaches. The HTL inspired models - essentially fixing the regulators by elementary vacuum cross sections and decay amplitudes instead of properties of the QGP at finite temperature - provide quite different results especially w.r.t. the temperature dependence of the $qQ$ and $gQ$ cross sections (in all settings). Accordingly, the transport properties of heavy quarks will be very different as a function of temperature when compared to DQPM results.

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arXiv2014

Strangeness in Quark Matter 2013: Opening Talk

We discuss several new developments in the field of strange and heavy flavor physics in high energy heavy ion collisions. As shown by many recent theoretical works, heavy flavored particles give us a unique opportunity to study the properties of systems created in these collisions. Two in particular important aspects, the production of (multi) strange hypernuclei and the properties of heavy flavor mesons, are at the core of several future facilities and will be discussed in detail.

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arXiv2014

Directed flow, a signal for the phase transition in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions?

The sign change of the slope of the directed flow of baryons has been predicted as a signal for a first order phase transition within fluid dynamical calculations. Recently, the directed flow of identified particles has been measured by the STAR collaboration in the beam energy scan (BES) program. In this article, we examine the collision energy dependence of directed flow $v_1$ in fluid dynamical model descriptions of heavy ion collisions for $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=3-20$ GeV. The first step is to reproduce the existing predictions within pure fluid dynamical calculations. As a second step we investigate the influence of the order of the phase transition on the anisotropic flow within a state-of-the-art hybrid approach that describes other global observables reasonably well. We find that, in the hybrid approach, there seems to be no sensitivity of the directed flow on the equation of state and in particular on the existence of a first order phase transition. In addition, we explore more subtle sensitivities like e.g. the Cooper-Frye transition criterion and discuss how momentum conservation and the definition of the event plane affects the results. At this point, none of our calculations matches qualitatively the behavior of the STAR data, the values of the slopes are always larger than in the data.

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arXiv2013

A 3+1 dimensional viscous hydrodynamic code for relativistic heavy ion collisions

We describe the details of 3+1 dimensional relativistic hydrodynamic code for the simulations of quark-gluon/hadron matter expansion in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. The code solves the equations of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics in the Israel-Stewart framework. With the help of ideal-viscous splitting, we keep the ability to solve the equations of ideal hydrodynamics in the limit of zero viscosities using a Godunov-type algorithm. Milne coordinates are used to treat the predominant expansion in longitudinal (beam) direction effectively. The results are successfully tested against known analytical relativistic inviscid and viscous solutions, as well as against existing 2+1D relativistic viscous code.

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arXiv2013

Polarized $χ_{c2}$-charmonium production in antiproton-nucleus interactions

Starting from the Feynman diagram representation of multiple scattering we consider the polarized $χ_c$(1P)-charmonia production in antiproton-nucleus reactions close to the threshold ($p_{\rm lab}=5-7$ GeV/c). The rescattering and absorption of the incoming antiproton and outgoing charmonium on nucleons are taken into account, including the possibility of the elastic and nondiagonal (flavor-conserving) scattering $χ_{cJ} N \to χ_{cJ^\prime} N$, $J,J^\prime=0,1,2$. The elementary amplitudes of the latter processes are evaluated by expanding the physical $χ_c$-states in the Clebsch-Gordan series of the $c \bar c$ states with fixed values of internal orbital angular momentum ($L_z$) and spin projections on the $χ_c$ momentum axis. The total interaction cross sections of these $c \bar c$ states with nucleons have been calculated in previous works using the QCD factorization theorem and the nonrelativistic quarkonium model and turned out to be strongly $L_z$-dependent due to the transverse size difference. This directly leads to finite values of the $χ_c$-nucleon nondiagonal scattering amplitudes. We show that the $χ_{c0} N \to χ_{c2} N$ transitions significantly influence the $χ_{c2}$-production with helicity zero at small transverse momenta. This can serve as a signal in future experimental tests of the quark structure of $χ_c$-states by the PANDA collaboration at FAIR.

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arXiv2013

3+1 dimensional viscous hydrodynamics at high baryon densities

We apply a 3+1D viscous hydrodynamic + cascade model to the heavy ion collision reactions with $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=6.3\dots39$ GeV. To accommodate the model for a given collision energy range, the initial conditions for hydrodynamic phase are taken from UrQMD, and the equation of state at finite baryon density is based on Chiral model coupled to the Polyakov loop. We study the collision energy dependence of pion and kaon rapidity distributions and $m_T$-spectra, as well as charged hadron elliptic flow and how shear viscosity affects them. The model calculations are compared to the data for Pb-Pb collisions at CERN SPS, as well as for Au-Au collisions in the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program energies at BNL RHIC. The data favours the value of shear viscosity $η/s\gtrsim0.2$ for this collision energy range.

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arXiv2013

Beam energy scan using a viscous hydro+cascade model

Following the experimental program at BNL RHIC, we perform a similar "energy scan" using 3+1D viscous hydrodynamics coupled to the UrQMD hadron cascade, and study the collision energy dependence of pion and kaon rapidity distributions and $m_T$-spectra, as well as charged hadron elliptic flow. To this aim the equation of state for finite baryon density from a Chiral model coupled to the Polyakov loop is employed for hydrodynamic stage. 3D initial conditions from UrQMD are used to study gradual deviation from boost-invariant scaling flow. We find that the inclusion of shear viscosity in the hydrodynamic stage of evolution consistently improves the description of the data for Pb-Pb collisions at CERN SPS, as well as of the elliptic flow measurements for Au-Au collisions in the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at BNL RHIC. The suggested value of shear viscosity is $η/s\ge0.2$ for $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=6.3\dots39$ GeV.

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arXiv2013

Evidence for flow in pPb collisions at 5 TeV from v2 mass splitting

We show that a fluid dynamical scenario describes quantitatively the observed mass splitting of the elliptical flow coefficients v2 for pions, kaons, and protons. This provides a strong argument in favor of the existence of a fluid dynamical expansion in pPb collisions at 5TeV.

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arXiv2013

Mechanisms for production of hypernuclei beyond the neutron and proton drip lines

We analyze hypernuclei coming from fragmentation and multifragmentation of spectator residues obtained in relativistic ion collisions. These hypernuclei have a broad distribution in masses and isospin. They reach beyond the neutron and proton drip lines, and they are expected to be stable with respect to neutron and proton emission. This gives us the opportunity to investigate the properties of exotic hypernuclei, as well as the properties of normal nuclei beyond the drip lines, which can be produced after weak decay of such hypernuclei.

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arXiv2013

Hadronic Freeze-Out in A+A Collisions meets the Lattice QCD Parton-Hadron Transition Line

We analyze hadrochemical freeze-out in central Pb+Pb collisions at CERN SPS and LHC energies. Employing the UrQMD hybrid transport model we study the effects of the final hadron/resonance expansion phase on the hadron multiplicities established at hadronization. The bulk meson yields freeze out directly at hadronization whereas the baryon-antibaryon sector is subject to significant alterations, due to annihilation and regeneration processes. We quantify the latter changes by survival factors for each species which are applied to modify the statistical model predictions for the data. The modified SM analysis recovers the hadronization points, which coincide with the recent lattice QCD predictions of the parton-hadron transition line at finite baryochemical potential.

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arXiv2013

System Size and Energy Dependence of Dilepton Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions at SIS Energies

We study the dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions at energies of 1-2 AGeV as well as in proton induced pp, pn, pd and p+A reactions from 1 GeV up to 3.5 GeV. For the analysis we employ three different transport models - the microscopic off-shell Hadron-String-Dynamics (HSD) transport approach, the Isospin Quantum Molecular Dynamics (IQMD) approach as well as the Ultra-relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics (UrQMD) approach. We confirm the experimentally observed enhancement of the dilepton yield (normalized to the multiplicity of neutral pions $N_{π^0}$) in heavy-ion collisions with respect to that measured in $NN = (pp+pn)/2$ collisions. We identify two contributions to this enhancement: a) the $pN$ bremsstrahlung which scales with the number of collisions and not with the number of participants, i.e. pions; b) the dilepton emission from intermediate $Δ$'s which are part of the reaction cycles $Δ\to πN ; πN \to Δ$ and $NN\to NΔ; NΔ\to NN$. With increasing system size more generations of intermediate $Δ$'s are created. If such $Δ$ decays into a pion, the pion can be reabsorbed, however, if it decays into a dilepton, the dilepton escapes from the system. Thus, experimentally one observes only one pion (from the last produced $Δ$) whereas the dilepton yield accumulates the contributions from all $Δ$'s of the cycle. We show as well that the Fermi motion enhances the production of pions and dileptons in the same way. Furthermore, employing the off-shell HSD approach, we explore the influence of in-medium effects like the modification of self-energies and spectral functions of the vector mesons due to their interactions with the hadronic environment.

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arXiv2013

Charmonium production in antiproton-nucleus reactions at low energies

The J/Ψ(1S) and Ψ'(2S) production near threshold in antiproton-nucleus reactions is calculated on the basis of the Glauber model. The model takes into account the antiproton (pre)absorption, proton Fermi motion, and charmonium formation length. We confirm earlier prediction that the charmonium production in $\bar pA$ collisions at $p_{lab}=3-10$ GeV/c is not influenced by formation length effects and is very well suited to determine the genuine charmonium-nucleon dissociation cross sections. The comparison is performed with the J/Ψphotoproduction at high energies, where formation length effects play a very important role. However, we demonstrate that the detailed structure of the proton and neutron density profiles has to be taken into account, if one wants to extract information on the J/ΨN dissociation cross section from J/Ψtransparency ratios. These studies are relevant for the upcoming PANDA experiment at FAIR.

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arXiv2012

Hydrodynamics at large baryon densities: Understanding proton vs. anti-proton v_2 and other puzzles

We study the importance of the initial state, baryon stopping and baryon number transport for the dynamical evolution of a strongly interacting system produced in heavy ion collisions. We employ a hybrid model, which combines the fluid dynamical evolution of the fireball with a transport treatment for the initial state and the final hadronic phase. We present results for collisions at beam energies from sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7 to 200 GeV. We study various observables such as the centrality dependent freeze out parameters, the non-monotonic behavior of effective slope parameter parameter with particle mass as well as the apparent difference in particle and anti-particle elliptic flow. Our results are in reasonable agreement with the available data. We find that the propagation of the baryon-number current in the hydrodynamic evolution as well as the transport treatment of the hadronic phase are essential for reproducing the experimental data.

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arXiv2012

Hypernuclei, dibaryon and antinuclei production in high energy heavy ion collisions: Thermal production vs. Coalescence

We study the production of (hyper-)nuclei and di-baryons in most central heavy Ion collisions at energies of $E_{lab}=1-160 A$ GeV. In particular we are interested in clusters produced from the hot and dense fireball. The formation rate of strange and non-strange clusters is estimated by assuming thermal production from the intermediate phase of the UrQMD-hydro hybrid model and alternatively by the coalescence mechanism from a hadronic cascade model. Both model types are compared in detail. For most energies we find that both approaches agree in their predictions for the yields of the clusters. Only for very low beam energies, and for di-baryons including $Ξ$'s, we observe considerable differences. We also study the production of anti-matter clusters up to top RHIC energies and show that the observation of anti-$^4He$ and even anti-$^4_ΛHe$ is feasible. We have found a considerable qualitative difference in the energy dependence of the strangeness population factor $R_H$ when comparing the thermal production with the coalescence results.

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arXiv2012

Jets, Bulk Matter, and their Interaction in Heavy Ion Collisions at Several TeV

We discuss a theoretical scheme that accounts for bulk matter, jets, and the interaction between the two. The aim is a complete description of particle production at all transverse momentum ($p_{t}$) scales. In this picture, the hard initial scatterings result in mainly longitudinal flux tubes, with transversely moving pieces carrying the $p_{t}$ of the partons from hard scatterings. These flux tubes constitute eventually both bulk matter (which thermalizes and flows) and jets. We introduce a criterion based on parton energy loss to decide whether a given string segment contributes to the bulk or leaves the matter to end up as a jet of hadrons. Essentially low $p_{t}$ segments from inside the volume will constitute the bulk, high $p_{t}$ segments (or segments very close to the surface) contribute to the jets. The latter ones appear after the usual flux tube breaking via q-qbar production (Schwinger mechanism). Interesting is the transition region: Intermediate $p_{t}$ segments produced inside the matter close to the surface but having enough energy to escape, are supposed to pick up q-qbar pairs from the thermal matter rather than creating them via the Schwinger mechanism. This represents a communication between jets and the flowing bulk matter (fluid-jet interaction). Also very important is the interaction between jet hadrons and the soft hadrons from the fluid freeze-out. We employ the new picture to investigate Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV. We discuss the centrality and $p_{t}$ dependence of particle production and long range dihadron correlations at small and large $p_{t}$.

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arXiv2011

From FAIR to RHIC, hyper clusters and an effective strange EoS for QCD

Two major aspects of strange particle physics at the upcoming FAIR and NICA facilities and the RHIC low energy scan will be discussed. A new distinct production mechanism for hypernuclei will be presented, namely the production abundances for hypernuclei from $Λ$'s absorbed in the spectator matter in peripheral heavy ion collisions. As strangeness is not uniformly distributed in the fireball of a heavy ion collision, the properties of the equation of state therefore depend on the local strangeness fraction. The same, inside neutron stars strangeness is not conserved and lattice studies on the properties of finite density QCD usually rely on an expansion of thermodynamic quantities at zero strange chemical potential, hence at non-zero strange-densities. We will therefore discuss recent investigations on the EoS of strange-QCD and present results from an effective EoS of QCD that includes the correct asymptotic degrees of freedom and a deconfinement and chiral phase transition.

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