Photon-induced neutron, proton and alpha evaporation from heavy nucleus

TL;DR

This paper develops new models to simulate the excitation and decay of heavy nuclei in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC, accurately predicting particle emission cross sections and comparing with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces two novel approaches for modeling nuclear excitation energy and deexcitation, integrating them with existing decay simulation frameworks.

Findings

Predicted cross sections for neutron, proton, and alpha emission match experimental data.

New excitation energy modeling improves accuracy of nuclear decay simulations.

Comparison with ALICE data validates the proposed methods.

Abstract

In ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions (UPCs) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Pb nuclei are excited through interactions induced by strong electromagnetic fields. The expected excitation energy could reach hundreds MeV, which leads to the subsequent emission of various particles, including neutrons, protons, and alpha particles. To accurately describe deexcitation of nuclei, we have developed two novel approaches. The first method utilizes the Heavy Ion Phase Space Exploration (HIPSE) model to simulate pre-equilibrium emissions and to estimate the excitation energy of the remaining nucleus. Our second approach introduces a new technique for modeling the excitation energy of the nucleus. This method consists of a two-component function to represent the excitation energy distribution more precisely, accounting for the energy loss due to the interaction between photons and quasi-deuteron. Both of these modeling techniques are integrated with the results produced by the GEMINI++ generator, which implements the Hauser-Feshbach formalism to simulate the statistical decay of excited nuclei. The alternative calculations are done with EMPIRE platform. Using these approaches, we obtained the cross sections for the emission of neutrons, protons, and alpha particles resulting from UPC at the LHC. Our results were compared with the experimental data of the ALICE group on neutron and proton multiplicities.