Many-body correlations for nuclear physics across scales: from nuclei to quark-gluon plasmas to hadron distributions

Abstract

It is an experimental fact that multi-particle correlations in the final states of high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions are sensitive to collective correlations of nucleons in the wave functions of the colliding nuclei. Here, I show that this connection is more direct than it intuitively seems. With an energy deposition scheme inspired by high-energy quantum chromodynamics, and within a linearized description of initial-state fluctuations in the quark-gluon plasma, I exhibit relations between $N$-particle correlations in the final states of nuclear collisions and $N$-nucleon density distributions in the colliding nuclei. This result formally justifies the sensitivity of the outcome of high-energy collisions to features such as nuclear deformations. It paves the way, thus, to systematic studies of the impact of state-of-the-art nuclear interactions in such processes.

Comments: 23 pages; 6 figures; ancillary files contain Monte Carlo simulator (py-Jazma.py) and data analysis code (py-Jazma_analysis.py); v2 matches the published version: fixed Eqs (37) and (41), removed discussion leading to previous Eq (57), improved description of the Monte Carlo generator in Sec. 6.1, removed previous Eq (74) from the Conclusion