Impact of nuclear structure on longitudinal flow decorrelations in high-energy isobar collisions
M. Nie, C. Zhang, Zhenyu Chen, L. Yi, J. Jia
Abstract
Fluctuations of harmonic flow along pseudorapidity, known as flow decorrelations, are an important probe of the initial state geometry of the quark-gluon plasma. The flow decorrelations are shown to be sensitive to the collective structure of the colliding nuclei, as revealed clearly by comparing 96Ru+96Ru collisions and 96Zr+96Zr collisions, which have different nuclear structures. The flow decorrelations in central collisions are mostly sensitive to nuclear deformations, while those in the mid-central collisions are primarily sensitive to differences in skin thickness between 96Ru and 96Zr. Longitudinal flow decorrelations in heavy-ion collisions are a new tool to probe the structure of colliding nuclei.