Parton Hadron Quantum Molecular Dynamics (PHQMD) -- a Novel Microscopic N-Body Transport Approach for Heavy-Ion Dynamics and Hypernuclei Production

TL;DR

The paper introduces PHQMD, a new microscopic n-body transport model for simulating particle production, cluster formation, and hypernuclei creation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, extending existing approaches with density-dependent interactions.

Contribution

PHQMD is the first to incorporate density-dependent two-body interactions into a quantum molecular dynamics framework for heavy-ion collision simulations.

Findings

Successfully models cluster and hypernuclei formation.

Provides detailed dynamical evolution of n-body systems.

Aligns with experimental cluster production data.

Abstract

We present the novel microscopic n-body dynamical transport approach PHQMD(Parton-Hadron-Quantum-Molecular-Dynamics) for the description of particle production and cluster formation in heavy-ion reactions at relativistic energies. The PHQMD extends the established PHSD (Parton-Hadron-String-Dynamics) transport approach by replacing the mean field by density dependent two body interactions in a similar way as in the Quantum Molecular Dynamics (QMD) models. This allows for the calculation of the time evolution of the n-body Wigner density and therefore for a dynamical description of clusters and hypernuclei formation. The clusters are identified with the MST ('Minimum Spanning Tree') or the SACA ('Simulated Annealing Cluster Algorithm') algorithm which - by regrouping the nucleons in single nucleons and noninteracting clusters - finds the most bound configuration of nucleons and clusters. The selected results on clusters and hypernuclei production from Ref. arXiv:1907.03860 are discussed in this contribution.