Probing the sensitivity of anisotropic flow coefficients to the initial nuclear structure in pO and OO collisions at the LHC

Abstract

RHIC and LHC have injected 16O nuclei in their accelerator complexes with a focus on investigating collectivity and the origin of quark-gluon plasma signatures in small collision systems. The 16O nuclei are known to possess clusters of α-particles (4He) inside the nucleus. This paper attempts to study the clustered-nuclear-geometry dependence of anisotropic flow coefficients such as elliptic flow (v2) and triangular flow (v3), which are sensitive to the nuclear geometry of colliding nuclei. The study is performed in pO and OO collisions at sNN=9.61 TeV and 7 TeV respectively, employing a hybrid model encompassing IP-Glasma + MUSIC + iSS + UrQMD. The results of the clustered nuclear geometry are compared with those of the Woods–Saxon nuclear profile. Both initial and final state anisotropies are estimated. This study is thus one of its first kind, where the study of anisotropic flow coefficients for pO and OO collisions is presented using a hybrid hydrodynamics model. While the effect of α-clustering in pO is found to be small, it is significant for each observable studied in OO collisions. It is also observed that the magnitude of this effect has a noteworthy dependence on the size of the 4He. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.