Activation of momentum fluctuations in wave packet molecular dynamics: Impacts on momentum distributions of projectilelike fragments

TL;DR

This paper improves wave packet momentum fluctuation activation in molecular dynamics simulations, leading to more accurate momentum distributions of projectile-like fragments in nuclear reactions, especially for 11B from 12C reactions.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to activate momentum fluctuations in AMD simulations, enhancing the modeling of recoil effects and fragment momentum distributions.

Findings

Correctly reproduces recoil effects in momentum distributions

Significantly improves agreement with experimental data

Identifies two components in the momentum distribution related to different reaction processes

Abstract

Molecular dynamics approaches use wave packets as nucleon wave functions to simulate the time evolution of nuclear reactions. It is crucial to activate the momentum fluctuation inherent in each wave packet so that it properly affects the time evolution. In the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) model, this has traditionally been done by splitting the wave packets, i.e., by introducing a random fluctuation to the wave packet center of each particle. The present work proposes an improved approach to activate the fluctuation in both the one-body mean-field propagation and the two-nucleon collision processes, consistently based on the gradual or sudden change of the degree of isolation, which is derived from the fragment number function used for the zero-point energy subtraction. This new method is applied to the 12C + 12C and 12C + p reactions at about 100 MeV/nucleon, focusing on the momentum distribution of the 11B fragments produced by one-proton removal from the 12C projectile. The results show that, with the momentum fluctuation suitably activated, the method correctly accounts for the recoil from the removed nucleon to the residue and the 11B momentum distribution is significantly improved, while without activating the fluctuation the distribution is too narrow compared to the experimental data. Furthermore, the AMD results indicate that the momentum distribution consists of two components; one is the high $P_z$ component with a small shift from the beam velocity, resulting from the simple removal of a proton after an energetic collision with a target particle; the other is the low $P_z$ component with a larger peak shift resulting from the decay of an excited 12C nucleus in a longer time scale. The activation of momentum fluctuation mainly affects the high $P_z$ component to broaden it. The role of cluster correlations in this problem is also investigated.