Longitudinal dynamics and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions
Chun Shen, Björn Schenke
Abstract
This work presents a three-dimensional dynamical initialization model for relativistic heavy-ion collisions, implementing local energy-momentum conservation and baryon charge fluctuations at string junctions. Constraining parameters using experimental data from $p+p$ collisions at various collision energies, the model provides a very good description of the charged hadron and net proton rapidity distributions in $\mathrm{Au}+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions from 7.7 to 200 GeV and $\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}$ collisions at 8.77 and 17.3 GeV. We demonstrate the importance of fluctuations of baryon densities to string junctions for describing net-proton distributions at collision energies of 62.4 and 200 GeV. Including this improved baryon stopping description along with the requirement of strangeness neutrality also yields a good description of identified particle yields as functions of the collision energy above 7.7 GeV. We further study asymmetric $p+\mathrm{Al}$ and $(p,d,^{3}\mathrm{He})+\mathrm{Au}$ collisions at the top Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) energy and $p+\mathrm{Pb}, \mathrm{Xe}+\mathrm{Xe}$, and $\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}$ collisions at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies. We identify the produced particle rapidity distributions in asymmetric collision systems as particularly useful for constraining models of the early-time longitudinal dynamics.