Influence of nuclear structure in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Many probes are proposed to determine the quark-gluon plasma and explore its properties in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Some of them are related to initial states of the collisions, such as collective flow, Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) correlation, chiral magnetic effects and so on. The initial states can come from geometry overlap of the colliding nuclei, fluctuations or nuclear structure with the intrinsic geometry asymmetry. The initial geometry asymmetry can transfer to the final momentum distribution in the aspect of hydrodynamics during the evolution of the fireball. Different from traditional methods for nuclear structure study, the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions could provide a potential platform to investigate nuclear structures with the help of the final-state observables after the fireball expansion. This chapter first presents a brief introduction of the initial states in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, and then delivers a mini-review for the nuclear structure effects on experimental observables in the relativistic energy domain.Comment: 28 pages, 21 figures; contribution to the "Handbook of Nuclear Physics", Springer, 2022, edited by I. Tanihata, H. Toki, and T. Kajin