QCD Equation of State of Dense Nuclear Matter from a Bayesian Analysis of Heavy-Ion Collision Data
Manjunath Omana Kuttan, Jan Steinheimer, Kai Zhou, Horst Stoecker
Abstract
Bayesian methods are used to constrain the density dependence of the QCD equation of state (EOS) for dense nuclear matter using the data of mean transverse kinetic energy and elliptic flow of protons from heavy ion collisions (HICs), in the beam energy range sNN=2–10 GeV. The analysis yields tight constraints on the density dependent EOS up to 4 times the nuclear saturation density. The extracted EOS yields good agreement with other observables measured in HIC experiments and constraints from astrophysical observations both of which were not used in the inference. The sensitivity of inference to the choice of observables is also discussed.Received 14 December 2022Revised 24 April 2023Accepted 18 October 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.202303Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasEquations of state of nuclear matterRelativistic heavy-ion collisionsTransport in heavy-ion collisionsTechniquesBayesian methodsMachine learningNuclear Physics