# Transport approaches for the Description of Intermediate-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions

## TL;DR

This paper reviews transport models used in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions, highlighting their roles, differences, and the importance of code evaluation for accurately extracting nuclear physics information.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of transport approaches, compares their features, and discusses efforts to evaluate and improve model reliability for nuclear physics research.

## Key findings

- Transport models are essential for studying non-equilibrium nuclear systems.
- Differences exist between various transport model predictions.
- Code evaluation efforts aim to reduce model uncertainties.

## Abstract

The transport approach is a useful tool to study dynamics of non-equilibrium systems. For heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies, where both the smooth nucleon potential and the hard-core nucleon-nucleon collision are important, the dynamics are properly described by two families of transport models, i.e., the Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck approach and the quantum molecular dynamics approach. These transport models have been extensively used to extract valuable information of the nuclear equation of state, the nuclear symmetry energy, and microscopic nuclear interactions from intermediate-energy heavy-ion collision experiments. On the other hand, there do exist deviations on the predications and conclusions from different transport models. Efforts on the transport code evaluation project are devoted in order to understand the model dependence of transport simulations and well control the main ingredients, such as the initialization, the mean-field potential, the nucleon-nucleon collision, etc. A new era of accurately extracting nuclear interactions from transport model studies is foreseen.