Nuclear Theory

The equation of state provided by effective models of strongly interacting matter should comply with the restrictions imposed by current astrophysical observations on compact stars. Using the equation of state given by the (axial-)vector meson extended linear sigma model, we determine the mass-radius relation and study whether these restrictions are satisfied under the assumption that most of the star is filled with quark matter. We study the dependence of the mass-radius relation on the parameters of the model.

The large values and the constituent-quark-number (NCQ) scaling of the elliptic flow of low- p T D mesons imply that charm quarks, initially produced through hard processes, might be partially thermalized through the strong interactions with the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. To quantify the degree of thermalization of low- p T charm quarks, we compare the D 0 meson spectra and elliptic flow from a hydrodynamic model to the experimental data as well as transport model simulations. We use an effective charm chemical potential at the freeze-out temperature to account for the initial charm quark production from hard processes and assume that they are thermalized in local comoving frame of the medium before freeze-out. D 0 mesons are sampled statistically from the freeze-out hyper-surface of the expanding QGP as described by the event-by-event (3+1)D viscous hydrodynamic model CLVisc. Both hydrodynamic and transport model can describe the elliptic flow of D 0 mesons at p T <3 GeV/ c as measured in Au+Au collisions at s NN ??????????=200 GeV. Though the experimental data on D 0 spectra are consistent with the hydrodynamic result at small p T ?? GeV/ c , they deviate from the hydrodynamic model at high transverse momentum p T >2 GeV/ c . The diffusion and parton energy loss mechanisms in the transport model can describe the measured spectra reasonably well within the theoretical uncertainty. Our comparative study indicates that charm quarks only approach to local thermal equilibrium at small p T even though they acquire sizable elliptic flow that is comparable to light-quark hadrons at both small and intermediate p T .

We review the key steps of the relativistic fluid dynamics formalism with spin degrees of freedom initiated recently. We obtain equations of motion of the expansion of the system from the underlying definitions of quantum kinetic theory for the equilibrium phase space distribution functions. We investigate the dynamics of spin polarization of the system in the Bjorken hydrodynamical background.

We study the hypernuclei of C and B isotopes by Hartree-Fock model with Skyrme-type nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-hyperon interactions. The calculated Λ binding energies agree well with the available experiment data. We found halo structure in the hyperon 1p -state with extended wave function beyond nuclear surface in the light C and B isotopes. We also found the enhanced electric dipole transition between 1p - and 1s -hyperon states, which could be the evidence for this hyperon halo structure.

In this proceeding, we review our recent work using deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the nature of the QCD transition in a hybrid modeling of heavy-ion collisions. Within this hybrid model, a viscous hydrodynamic model is coupled with a hadronic cascade "after-burner". As a binary classification setup, we employ two different types of equations of state (EoS) of the hot medium in the hydrodynamic evolution. The resulting final-state pion spectra in the transverse momentum and azimuthal angle plane are fed to the neural network as the input data in order to distinguish different EoS. To probe the effects of the fluctuations in the event-by-event spectra, we explore different scenarios for the input data and make a comparison in a systematic way. We observe a clear hierarchy in the predictive power when the network is fed with the event-by-event, cascade-coarse-grained and event-fine-averaged spectra. The carefully-trained neural network can extract high-level features from pion spectra to identify the nature of the QCD transition in a realistic simulation scenario.

We study the impact of strong magnetic fields on the pasta phases that are expected to exist in the inner crust of neutron stars. We employ the relativistic mean field model to describe the nucleon interaction and use the self-consistent Thomas-Fermi approximation to calculate the nonuniform matter in neutron star crust. The properties of pasta phases and crust-core transition are examined. It is found that as the magnetic field strength B is less than 10 17 G, the effects of magnetic field are not evident comparing with the results without magnetic field. As B is stronger than 10 18 G, the onset densities of pasta phases and crust-core transition density decrease significantly, and the density distributions of nucleons and electrons are also changed obviously.

We use a Bayesian inference analysis to explore the sensitivity of Taylor expansion parameters of the nuclear equation of state (EOS) to the neutron star dimensionless tidal deformability ( Λ ) on 1 to 2 solar masses neutron stars. A global power law dependence between tidal deformability and compactness parameter (M/R) is verified over this mass region. To avoid superfluous correlations between the expansion parameters, we use a correlation-free EOS model based on a recently published meta-modeling approach. We find that assumptions in the prior distribution strongly influence the constraints on Λ . The Λ constraints obtained from the neutron star merger event GW170817 prefer low values of L sym and K sym , for a canonical neutron star with 1.4 solar mass. For neutron star with mass <1.6 solar mass, L sym and K sym are highly correlated with the tidal deformability. For more massive neutron stars, the tidal deformability is more strongly correlated with higher order Taylor expansion parameters.

A theoretical analysis using an impact-parameter description of the collisions of deuterons with nuclei is carried out in the high-energy diffraction approximation. It is used to obtain the intensities and integrated cross sections for elastic scattering, for the emergence of the two incident nucleons from the collision whether they appear as an elastically scattered deuteron or as two unbound nucleons, and for the diffraction-induced dissociation of the deuteron into a free neutron and a free proton, as well as the total cross section. The cross section for collisions in which one or both of the nucleons is absorbed is derived in terms of the sum of the neutron-nucleus and proton-nucleus effective phase shifts. Expressions for the cross section for processes in which the proton (or neutron) is absorbed whether the neutron (or proton) is absorbed or not, and for the cross section for processes in which the neutron (or proton) is absorbed and the proton (or neutron) remains free are derived. A reduced form of a two-particle density matrix is introduced to directly derive expressions for the cross section for two-particle absorption in which both the proton and neutron are absorbed and for the cross section for stripping processes in which the proton (or neutron) is absorbed and the neutron (or proton) emerges as a free particle. The expression for the cross section for the breakup of the deuteron and the resulting emergence of one or two free nucleons is also derived. The mechanism by which the diffraction dissociation of the deuteron is induced is understood in an approximate semi-quantitative basis in classical terms (primarily the radial derivative of the radial impulse), allowing an estimate of where in the nuclear potential (beyond the "radius", near the "surface") the dissociation process tends to predominantly occur.

The effects of dark matter (DM) on the curvatures of the neutron star (NS) are examined by using the stiff and soft relativistic mean-field equation of states. The curvatures of the NSs are calculated with the variation of baryon density. Also, it is found that the radial variation of the different curvatures significantly affected by the presence of DM inside the NS. The effects of DM are less pronounced on the compactness of the maximum NS mass, but still significant. The NS surface curvature is found to be more remarkable for the massive star. The binding energy of the NSs become positive with the increasing DM momentum and makes the system unstable.

With the goal of using chiral interactions at various orders to explore properties of the few-body nuclear systems, we write the recently developed local chiral interactions as spherical irreducible tensors and implement them in the hyperspherical harmonics expansion method. We devote particular attention to three-body forces at next-to-next-to leading order, which play an important role in reproducing experimental data. We check our implementation by benchmarking the ground-state properties of 3 H, 3 He and 4 He against the available Monte Carlo calculations. We then confirm their order-by-order truncation error estimates and further investigate uncertainties in the charge radii obtained by using the precise muonic atom data for single-nucleon radii. Having local chiral Hamiltonians at various orders implemented in our hyperspherical harmonics suites of codes opens up the possibility to test such interactions on other light-nuclei properties, such as electromagnetic reactions.