Speaker
Description
The correlations among different symmetry planes, otherwise known as the symmetry plane correlations (SPCs), in heavy-ion collisions are driven by the corresponding participant plane correlations and are sensitive to the transport properties of the system formed. The participant plane correlations can vary with the fluctuating nuclear geometry and can therefore be influenced by the nuclear geometry of the collision species. These features of SPCs makes them one of the key probes to understand the impact of nuclear geometry in the final state of nuclear collisions.
In this presentation, I study the symmetry plane correlations in OO and Ne–Ne collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=5.36$ TeV using a multi-phase transport model. We use initial nuclear configurations from NLEFT and PGCM models. The study focuses in two specific SPCs, $\langle \cos[4(\psi_2 - \psi_4)]\rangle_{\rm GE}$ and $\langle \cos[6(\psi_3 - \psi_6)]\rangle_{\rm GE}$ as they are expected to be sensitive to the quadrupole and octupole deformations of $^{20}Ne$ and $^{16}$O nuclei, respectively. We observe a higher $\langle \cos[4(\psi_2 - \psi_4)]\rangle_{\rm GE}$ in Ne–Ne collisions than OO collisions, which hints at a higher quadrupole deformation of $^{20}Ne$ than $^{16}$O. In contrast, a higher $\langle \cos[6(\psi_3 - \psi_6)]\rangle_{\rm GE}$ in OO than Ne–Ne collisions can be an indication of higher octupole deformations in $^{16}$O nuclei due to the intrinsic tetrahedral geometry. We extend the study to tip-tip and body-body selected central collisions to ascertain these findings.