Speaker
Description
One of the major open problems in the collider physics community is understanding the onset of quark–gluon plasma (QGP) signatures. Collisions of Oxygen nuclei provide a golden opportunity to probe the emergence of collective phenomena in collider experiments. Additionally, $^{16}$O nuclei are theorized to possess a clustered nuclear structure, where α-particles occupy the corners of a regular tetrahedron. The anisotropic flow coefficients, which are key probes of collectivity, are sensitive to the geometry of the colliding nuclei. Therefore, this study focuses on anisotropic flow coefficients, namely elliptic flow ($v_2$) and triangular flow ($v_3$), and their fluctuations in OO and pO collisions using a hybrid framework (IP-Glasma + MUSIC + iSS + UrQMD).
The hybrid framework incorporates multiple models to simulate the realistic space–time evolution of the collision system. However, components such as IP-Glasma and MUSIC are computationally intensive, requiring large CPU resources to solve the Yang-Mills dynamics and viscous hydrodynamic equations with appropriate initial and boundary conditions, motivating the use of CPU and GPU accelerated workflows.
We compare the anisotropic flow coefficients in pO and OO collisions, assuming a clustered nuclear structure, with those obtained using a Woods-Saxon nuclear distribution. The results suggest that fluctuation-related observables, i.e., $v_2$ fluctuations and $v_3$, are sensitive to the presence of clustered nuclear structure in OO collisions. Moreover, a characteristic peak in $v_2$ is observed, which scales with the parameters of the clustered nuclear structure. These effects are weaker in pO collisions due to the limited phase space available to translate initial spatial anisotropies into final-state flow observables.