Using Heavy-Ion Collisions to Investigate Nuclear Structure

• Seyed Mohammad Ali Tabatabaee Mehr (School of Particles and Accelerators, IPM)

The main purpose of heavy-ion collision (HIC) is to create a liberated state of quark and gluon to study the macroscopic state of QCD matter. This includes the transport coefficient of the produced plasma as well as mapping the configuration of QCD degrees of freedom in various phases. To achieve this goal, it is crucial to model different stages after the collision, from the formation of the initial state to the final state and hadronization at freeze-out. In this context, the nuclear structure plays an important role in determining the initial conditions of the collision. Understanding the spatial distribution of nucleons and the correlations between them provides essential input to the evolution of the quark-gluon plasma. Particularly, features such as the nuclear deformation, fluctuations in the initial geometry, and two-body correlations influence the final observables, such as collective flow. In this talk, I will explain, in an ultra-central symmetric collisions and for the particular case of large nuclei, after using certain scale invariance in the process of entropy production, we are able to study the initial state of heavy-ion collision in a model-independent way. This approach enables us to study nuclear structure and extract key information about nuclear geometry, two-body correlation, fluctuations, skin thickness, and etc.