Extraction of ground-state nuclear deformations from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions: Nuclear structure physics context

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the nuclear shape-imaging method in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, highlighting its limitations in accurately capturing nuclear deformations and emphasizing the importance of incorporating nuclear structure knowledge.

Contribution

The paper identifies fundamental flaws in current shape-imaging techniques and advocates for integrating nuclear structure insights to improve analysis accuracy.

Findings

Current imaging methods neglect symmetry-breaking effects.

Incorrect inference of nuclear multipole moments from nucleonic correlations.

Integrating nuclear shape knowledge can enhance model calibration.

Abstract

The collective-flow-assisted nuclear shape-imaging method in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions has recently been used to characterize nuclear collective states. In this paper, we assess the foundations of the shape-imaging technique employed in these studies. We argue that some current UHIC nuclear imaging techniques neglect fundamental aspects of spontaneous symmetry-breaking and symmetry-restoration in colliding ions and incorrectly infer one-body multipole moments from studies of nucleonic correlations. Therefore, the impact of this approach on nuclear structure research has been overstated. Conversely, efforts to incorporate existing knowledge on nuclear shapes into analysis pipelines can be beneficial for benchmarking tools and calibrating models used to extract information from ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiments.