Collision integral with momentum-dependent potentials and its impact on pion production in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper develops a detailed model for collision processes in heavy-ion collisions that incorporates momentum-dependent potentials, revealing their significant influence on pion production and charged pion ratios, especially in neutron-rich systems.

Contribution

The work introduces a rigorous calculation of collision terms with momentum-dependent potentials and integrates them into a new transport code, enhancing the understanding of pion production mechanisms.

Findings

Momentum dependence significantly affects $NN o N \Delta$ processes.

Charged pion ratios are strongly influenced by neutron and proton potential differences.

High-density symmetry energy effects are comparatively small.

Abstract

The momentum dependence of the nucleon mean-field potential in a wide momentum range can be an important factor to determine the $\Delta$ resonance and pion production in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions. In particular, in neutron-rich systems such as ${}^{132}\mathrm{Sn}+{}^{124}\mathrm{Sn}$ collisions, we need to carefully treat the momentum dependence because the neutron and proton potentials can have different momentum dependence, as characterized at low momenta by effective masses. In the present work, we rigorously calculate the collision terms of $NN \leftrightarrow N \Delta$ and $\Delta \leftrightarrow N \pi$ processes with the precise conservation of energy and momentum under the presence of momentum-dependent potentials for the initial and final particles of the process. The potentials affect not only the threshold condition for the process but also the cross section in general as a function of the momenta of the initial particles, which is treated in a natural way in the present work. Calculations are performed by combining the nucleon dynamics obtained by the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) model with a newly developed transport code which we call sJAM. The calculated results for central ${}^{132}\mathrm{Sn}+{}^{124}\mathrm{Sn}$ collisions at 270 MeV/nucleon clearly show that the momentum dependence of the neutron and proton potentials has a significant impact on the $NN \to N \Delta$ process, and this information is strongly reflected in the charged pion ratio ($\pi^-/\pi^+$). We also investigate the effects of the high-density symmetry energy and the isovector part of the potential of $\Delta$ resonances on pion production, which we find are relatively small compared to the effect of the momentum dependence of the neutron and proton potentials.