Forced canonical thermalization in a hadronic transport approach at high density

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method called forced canonical thermalization within hadronic transport models to better simulate high-density regimes in heavy ion collisions, bridging dilute gas and ideal fluid limits.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to model high-density nuclear matter by interpolating between kinetic theory limits, improving the description of heavy ion collision dynamics at various energies.

Findings

Provides a framework for high-density regime simulation

Enables interpolation between dilute gas and ideal fluid limits

Applicable to low, intermediate, and high-energy nuclear collisions

Abstract

Hadronic transport approaches based on an effective solution of the relativistic Boltzmann equation are widely applied for the dynamical description of heavy ion reactions at low beam energies. At high densities, the assumption of binary interactions often used in hadronic transport approaches may not be applicable anymore. Therefore, we effectively simulate the high-density regime using the local forced canonical thermalization. This framework provides the opportunity to interpolate in a dynamical way between two different limits of kinetic theory: the dilute gas approximation and the ideal fluid case. This approach will be important for studies of the dynamical evolution of heavy ion collisions at low and intermediate energies as experimentally investigated at the beam energy scan program at RHIC, and in the future at FAIR and NICA. On the other hand, this new way of modelling hot and dense strongly-interacting matter might be relevant for small systems at high energies (LHC and RHIC) as well.