https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00965-1
Regular Article –Theoretical Physics
Impact of nuclear shape fluctuations in high-energy heavy ion collisions
1
Department of Chemistry, Stony Brook University, 11794, Stony Brook, NY, USA
2
Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 11976, Upton, NY, USA
c
jiangyong.jia@stonybrook.edu
Received:
12
January
2023
Accepted:
26
February
2023
Published online:
15
March
2023
The shape of atomic nuclei is often interpreted to possess a quadrupole deformation that fluctuates around some average profile. We investigate the impact of nuclear shape fluctuations on the initial state geometry in heavy ion collisions, particularly its eccentricity 
and inverse size 
, which can be related to the elliptic and radial flow in the final state. The fluctuation in overall quadrupole deformation enhances the variances and modifies the skewness and kurtosis of the and in a controllable manner. The fluctuation in triaxiality reduces the difference between prolate and oblate shape for any observable, whose values, in the large fluctuation limit, approach those obtained in collisions of rigid triaxial nuclei. The method to disentangle the mean and variance of the quadrupole deformation is discussed.
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