Intermediate-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions and Studies with Transport Models

Dear Colleagues,

Intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions provide an opportunity to study the dynamics of heavy-ion collisions and nuclear interactions dominated by nucleon degree of freedom. Transport models are among the essential tools that can be used to extract the nuclear matter equation of state (EOS), as well as the symmetry energy (E_sym), at a wide range of densities from potential experiments. The extracted information on the EOS and E_sym is important in understanding many astrophysical observables, including those related to neutron star properties and their mergers. In the past few decades, great achievements have been made in terms of describing heavy-ion collisions and constraining the nuclear matter EOS and E_sym with various probes—e.g., neutron proton yield ratios, collective flows, π^-/π⁺ yield ratios, etc. However, the dependence of models on the constraints of EOS and E_sym still exists and needs to be both understood well and reduced. Such model dependence may originate from different treatments of the initialization, mean-field potential, elastic and inelastic collisions, Pauli blocking, Coulomb potential, etc., in each transport model and should be optimized. Meanwhile, there have been attempts to incorporate additional dimensions of physics or techniques, such as short-range correlations, off-shell dynamics, particle subdivisions, phase-space constraints, etc., into the traditional frameworks of transport models. Of course, studies on intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions have not been limited to those based on transport simulations, and additional useful information can also be extracted from other approaches, e.g., statistical models, etc. Indeed, the applications of transport models are not confined to intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions, and any improvements on transport simulations can be extended to many other research fields, such as relativistic heavy-ion collisions, plasma physics, and radiation of heavy ions in materials, etc. This Special Issue aims to collect various advancements in constraining nuclear matter EOS and E_sym from intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions via transport models or other approaches, efforts in understanding and reducing a model’s dependence on transport simulations, applications of transport models in other research fields, and attempts to incorporate new concepts from physics and techniques into traditional transport frameworks.

Prof. Dr. Jun Xu
Prof. Dr. Yingxun Zhang
Guest Editors

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