BHAC-QGP: three-dimensional MHD simulations of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, II. Application to Au-Au collisions

TL;DR

This paper introduces BHAC-QGP, a new simulation code based on astrophysical MHD modeling, adapted for relativistic heavy-ion collisions, demonstrating high accuracy in Au-Au collision scenarios at RHIC energies.

Contribution

The paper presents BHAC-QGP, a novel general-relativistic MHD simulation code with adaptive mesh refinement tailored for heavy-ion collision modeling, enhancing accuracy over previous methods.

Findings

Successfully reproduces results of existing simulations

Achieves higher accuracy in modeling Au-Au collisions

Demonstrates applicability to RHIC energy scenarios

Abstract

We present BHAC-QGP, a new numerical code to simulate the evolution of matter created in heavy-ion collisions. BHAC-QGP is based on the Black Hole Accretion Code (BHAC), which has been designed to model astrophysical processes through the solution of the equations of general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. Like the mother code, BHAC-QGP uses Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR), which allows for a dynamic adjustment of the resolution in regions of the computational domain where a particularly high accuracy is needed. We here discuss a number of applications of BHAC-QGP to Au-Au collisions at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) energies and show that the code is able to reproduce results of other simulations of these scenarios, but with much higher accuracy.