Alpha clusters and collective flow in ultra-relativistic carbon - heavy nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper explores how ultrarelativistic carbon-heavy nucleus collisions can reveal the intrinsic alpha cluster structure of carbon-12 through harmonic flow measurements, offering insights into nuclear ground-state configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using harmonic flow ratios based on cumulant moments to probe the alpha clustering in carbon-12 during high-energy collisions.

Findings

Harmonic flow ratios are sensitive to alpha clustering effects.

Clusterization leads to distinctive initial triangularity in the collision fireball.

Event-by-event flow analysis can reveal ground-state nuclear structures.

Abstract

We investigate ultrarelativistic collisions of the 12C nucleus with heavy targets and show that the harmonic flow measures based on ratios of cumulant moments are particularly suited to study the intrinsic deformation of the 12C wave function. That way one can probe the expected alpha clusterization in the ground state, which leads to large initial triangularity in the shape of the fireball in the transverse plane. We show that the clusterization effect results in very characteristic behavior of the ratios of the cumulant moments as functions of the number of participant nucleons, both for the elliptic and triangular deformations. Thus the experimental event-by-event studies of harmonic flow in ultrarelativistic light-heavy collisions may offer a new window to look at the ground-state structure of light nuclei.