Probing nuclear structure of heavy ions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
Heikki Mäntysaari, Björn Schenke, Chun Shen, W. Zhao
Abstract
We perform high-statistics simulations to study the impacts of nuclear structure on the ratios of anisotropic flow observables in $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}+^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ and $^{129}\mathrm{Xe}+^{129}\mathrm{Xe}$ collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Even with $40%$ difference in atomic numbers between $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ and $^{129}\mathrm{Xe}$ nuclei, the ratios of anisotropic flow in the same centrality class between the two collision systems are strongly affected by the nuclear structure inputs in the initial state. The ratios of ${v}_{2}{4}/{v}_{2}{2}$ in these collisions are sensitive to the nuclear skin thickness of the colliding nuclei, providing indirect constraints on the nuclei's neutron skin. Our model predictions serve as a benchmark to compare with experimental measurements.