How nuclear jets form and disintegrate into clusters in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear jets form and disintegrate into clusters during heavy-ion collisions, using a dynamical approach to explore mechanisms beyond traditional fission or fragmentation models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamical framework based on the Boltzmann-Langevin equation to study jet formation and breakup in nuclear collisions, highlighting mechanisms independent of surface energy effects.

Findings

Nuclear jets can form under diverse conditions not leading to fission.

Jets can disintegrate through mechanisms unrelated to surface energy.

The dynamical approach captures out-of-equilibrium jet phenomena.

Abstract

The most extreme deformations that can be explored in heavy-ion collisions at Fermi-energies are collimated flows of nuclear matter which recall jet dynamics. From microphysics to the cosmological scale, jets are rather common topologies. In nuclear physics, pioneering works focused on the breakup of these structures, resulting into early nuclear-fission models in analogy to the droplet formation in viscous liquids; such view became emblematic to explain surface-energy effects and surface instability by analogy with the Rayleigh instability. Through a dynamical approach based on the Boltzmann-Langevin equation, well adapted to out-of-equilibrium conditions, we explored the possibility that nuclear jets could arise in heavy-ion collisions from different conditions than those leading to fission or neck fragmentation, and that they can breakup from mechanisms that are almost unrelated to cohesive properties.