Heavy Experiments Research Articles

New Approach to Measure Centrality in the HADES Heavy-Ion Experiments

New Approach to Measure Centrality in the HADES Heavy-Ion Experiments

Track Reconstruction in a High-Density Environment with ALICE

ALICE is the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Its main tracking and particle-identification detector is a large volume Time Projection Chamber (TPC). The TPC has been designed to perform well in the high-track density environment created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. In this proceeding, we describe the track reconstruction procedure in ALICE. In particular, we focus on the two main challenges that were faced during the Run 2 data-taking period (2015–2018) of the LHC, which were the baseline fluctuations and the local space charge distortions in the TPC. We present the corresponding solutions in detail and describe the software tools that allowed us to circumvent these challenges.

Imposing multi-physics constraints at different densities on the neutron Star Equation of State

Neutron star matter spans a wide range of densities, from that of nuclei at the surface to exceeding several times normal nuclear matter density in the core. While terrestrial experiments, such as nuclear or heavy-ion collision experiments, provide clues about the behaviour of dense nuclear matter, one must resort to theoretical models of neutron star matter to extrapolate to higher density and finite neutron/proton asymmetry relevant for neutron stars. In this work, we explore the parameter space within the framework of the Relativistic Mean Field model allowed by present uncertainties compatible with state-of-the-art experimental data. We apply a cut-off filter scheme to constrain the parameter space using multi-physics constraints at different density regimes: chiral effective field theory, nuclear and heavy-ion collision data as well as multi-messenger astrophysical observations of neutron stars. Using the results of the study, we investigate possible correlations between nuclear and astrophysical observables.

Track recognition for the [formula omitted] telescopes with silicon strip detectors

For the high granularity and high energy resolution, Silicon Strip Detector (SSD) is widely applied in assembling telescopes to measure the charged particles in heavy ion reactions. In this paper, we present a novel method to achieve track recognition in the SSD telescopes of the Compact Spectrometer for Heavy Ion Experiment (CSHINE). Each telescope consists of a single-sided silicon strip detector (SSSSD) and a double-sided silicon strip detector (DSSSD) backed by 3 × 3 CsI(Tl) crystals. Detector calibration and track reconstruction are implemented. Special decoding algorithm is developed for the multi-track recognition procedure to deal with the multi-hit effect convoluted by charge sharing and the missing signals with certain probability. It is demonstrated that the track recognition efficiency of the method is approximately 90% and 80% for the DSSSD-CsI and SSSSD–DSSSD events, respectively.

Integrated high-throughput research in extreme environments targeted toward nuclear structural materials discovery

Arguably one of the most important factors in the fast deployment of advanced nuclear reactors, with major improvements in safety, is the development and qualification of radiation and corrosion tolerant materials, that serve as the structural components in reactor cores. However, the discovery, improvement, and assessment of materials resistant to radiation and corrosion in the advanced reactors’ extreme environments is quite demanding, time-consuming, and costly, which represents a significant barrier to materials innovation and qualification for nuclear energy. This short review highlights a novel, integrated, high-throughput (HTP) research framework to develop understanding and predictive models for irradiation at high doses and molten salt corrosion responses of structural Compositionally Complex Alloys (CCAs), with the objective to accelerate materials discovery for high-temperature nuclear structural applications. Using a novel in situ alloying technique, arrays of additively manufactured bulk CCAs are processed, heat-treated, and characterized, while still attached to the build plate. Leveraging recent development in automation of heavy-ion irradiation experiments at the University of Wisconsin Ion Beam Laboratory, arrays of CCAs can be rapidly irradiated to hundreds of dpa up to 800 °C. An innovative droplet corrosion method is also used to test molten salt corrosion behavior of CCAs arrays. Automated and rapid characterization methods are used to assess the irradiation and molten salt corrosion resistance of CCAs. Finally, a brief discussion of the results is presented considering future use of machine-learning-based methods to develop useful trends and highlight features of importance. Using this novel HTP approach, a robust and reliable database containing literally hundreds of data points for irradiation and corrosion responses of CCAs can be established within a year, which is considered a significant increase in the pace of nuclear structural materials research and discovery.

Energy Dependence of Strangeness Production in Heavyion Collision

An experimental overview of the energy dependence of strangeness production is presented. The strange hadrons are considered a good probe to study the QCD matter created in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. The heavy-ion experiments at SPS, RHIC, and LHC have recorded a wealth of data in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at several beam energies. In this proceeding, I discuss the invariant yield and azimuthal anisotropy measurement of strange hadrons in nucleus-nucleus collisions at SPS, RHIC, and LHC.

Prospects for the NA60+ experiment at the CERN SPS

A new heavy-ion experiment on fixed target, NA60+, has been proposed at the CERN SPS for data taking in the next years. Its main goals will be focused on precision studies of thermal dimuons, heavy quark and strangeness production in Pb-Pb collisions at center-of-mass energies ranging from 5 to 17 GeV, which will provide a unique opportunity to investigate the region of the QCD phase diagram at high baryochemical potential (μB ~ 200 – 400 MeV). The key points of the NA60+ very broad and ambitious physics program will be described.

News from the strong interactions program of NA61/SHINE

NA61/SHINE (SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment) is a fixedtarget experiment operating at the CERN SPS accelerator. The main goal of the strong interactions program of NA61/SHINE is to study the properties of the phase transition between confined matter and quark-gluon plasma by performing a two-dimensional scan in beam momentum and size of collided nuclei. Within this program, collisions of different systems (p+p, p+Pb, Be+Be, Ar+Sc, Xe+La, Pb+Pb) over a wide range of beam momenta (13A-150(8)A GeV/c) have been recorded. This contribution discusses the latest results of hadron production in p+p, Be+Be, Ar+Sc and Pb+Pb reactions measured by the NA61/SHINE. In particular, the results include charged kaons and pions spectra and higher-order moments of multiplicity and net charge distributions. The presented data are compared with the predictions of different theoretical models as well as the results from other experiments. Finally, the motivation and plans for future NA61/SHINE measurements are discussed.

Testing a Fault Tolerant Mixed-Signal Design Under TID and Heavy Ions

This work presents results of three distinct radiation tests performed upon a fault-tolerant data acquisition system comprising a design diversity redundancy technique. The first and second experiments are Total Ionizing Dose (TID) essays, comprising gamma and X-ray irradiations. The last experiment considers single event effects, in which two heavy ion irradiation campaigns are carried out. The case study system comprises three analog-to-digital converters and two software-based voters, besides additional software and hardware resources used for controlling, monitoring and memory management. The applied Diversity Triple Modular Redundancy (DTMR) technique, comprises different levels of diversity (temporal and architectural). The circuit was designed in a programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC), fabricated in a 130nm CMOS technology process. Results show that the technique may increase the lifetime of the system under TID if comparing with a non-redundant implementation. Considering the heavy ions experiments the system was proved effective to tolerate 100% of the observed errors originated in the converters, while errors in the processing unit present a higher criticality. Critical errors occurring in one of the voters were also observed. A second heavy-ion campaign was then carried out to investigate the voters reliability, comparing the dynamic cross-section of three different software-based voter schemes implemented in the considered PSoC.

Pileup correction on higher-order cumulants with unfolding approach

Higher-order cumulants of conserved charge distributions are sensitive observables to probe the critical fluctuations near QCD critical point in heavy-ion collisions. Due to high interaction rate, pileup event can be one of the major sources of background in the measurements of higher-order cumulants. In this paper, we studied the effects of pileup events on higher-order cumulants of proton multiplicity distributions using UrQMD model. It is found that the proposed pileup correction fails if the correction parameters are determined by the Glauber fitting of charged particle multiplicities, which is usually done in the real heavy-ion experiment. To address this, we propose a model independent unfolding approach to determine the parameters in the pileup correction. This approach can be applied in the pileup correction for the future measurement of higher-order cumulants in heavy-ion collision experiment.

Fixed point behavior of cumulants in the three-dimensional Ising universality class

High-order cumulants and factorial cumulants of conserved charges are suggested for the study of the critical dynamics in heavy-ion collision experiments. In this paper, using the parametric representation of the three-dimensional Ising model which is believed to belong to the same universality class as quantum chromo-dynamics, the temperature dependence of the second- to fourth-order (factorial) cumulants of the order parameter is studied. It is found that the values of the normalized cumulants are independent of the external magnetic field at the critical temperature, which results in a fixed point in the temperature dependence of the normalized cumulants. In finite-size systems simulated using the Monte Carlo method, this fixed point behavior still exists at temperatures near the critical. This fixed point behavior has also appeared in the temperature dependence of normalized factorial cumulants from at least the fourth order. With a mapping from the Ising model to QCD, the fixed point behavior is also found in the energy dependence of the normalized cumulants (or fourth-order factorial cumulants) along different freeze-out curves.

A Body-Biasing Technique for Single-Event Transient Mitigation in 28-nm Bulk CMOS Process

Single-event transient (SET) glitches can be modified by body-biasing controlling techniques. In this article, a body-biasing configuration is proposed in combinational circuits, which plays no role during devices’ normal operation, but significantly mitigates SET disturbance as ion strike happens. NOR cell chains and NAND cell chains serve as cases to investigate the impact of the proposed configuration on SET vulnerabilities under two groups of heavy-ion experiments. Experimental data illustrate that transistors with body tied to source (BTS) significantly reduce the SET cross section compared with the normal designs. The physical mechanism of the proposed technique is quantitatively analyzed in detail.

Numerical Simulations of Laser-Induced Shock Experiments on Graphite.

The development of particle accelerators with ever increasing energies is raising the standards of the structures which could interact with the particle beams. These structures could be subjected to strong shockwaves in accidental scenarios. In order to test materials in such conditions, one of the most promising techniques is the impact with high-power lasers. In view of the setting up of future experimental campaigns within the Petawatt High-Energy Laser for Heavy Ion Experiments (PHELIX), the present work aims at the development of a numerical approach for the simulation of graphite impacted by laser beams. In particular, the focus is on the spallation damage caused by shockwave reflection: a sufficiently intense laser beam could ablate the matter until plasma conditions, hence producing a shockwave which could travel inside the material and reach a free surface. A numerical model to properly describe the spall fragmentation of graphite has been calibrated on the basis of literature-available experimental data. The numerical approach is a ‘two-step’ procedure: the first step is the definition of the laser–matter interaction and the second one concerns the description of the shockwave evolution into matter. The simulations satisfactorily reproduce the dynamic response of graphite impacted by two different laser sources with various intensities, despite the difficulties of characterising a phenomenon which is extremely fast and chaotic.

Effect of non-uniform efficiency on higher-order cumulants in heavy-ion collisions * *Supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFE0205200, 2018YFE0104700, 2020YFE0202002), Natural Science Foundation of China (11890711, 11890712, 12122505, 11828501, 11861131009), Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation (1808085J02) and Innovation Fund of Key Laboratory of Quark and Lepton Physics (QLPL2020P01)

We perform a systematic study on the effect of non-uniform track efficiency correction in higher-order cumulant analysis in heavy-ion collisions. Through analytical derivation, we find that the true values of cumulants can be successfully reproduced by the efficiency correction with an average of the realistic detector efficiency for particles with the same charges within each single phase space. The theoretical conclusions are supported by a toy model simulation by tuning the non-uniformity of the efficiency employed in the track-by-track efficiency correction method. The valid averaged efficiency is found to suppress the statistical uncertainties of the reproduced cumulants dramatically. Thus, usage of the averaged efficiency requires a careful study of phase space dependence. This study is important for carrying out precision measurements of higher-order cumulants in heavy-ion collision experiments at present and in future.

Simulation Study on Single-Event Burnout in Rated 1.2-kV 4H-SiC Super-Junction VDMOS

This article presents the 2-D numerical simulation results of the heavy-ion-induced leakage current degradation and single-event burnout (SEB) in the rated 1.2-kV silicon-carbide (SiC) super-junction (SJ) vertical diffusion metal-oxide-semiconductor (VDMOS). The employed simulation physics models were validated by the heavy-ion irradiation experiments of the commercially rated 1.2-kV SiC common VDMOS (C-VDMOS), which indicated a severe degeneration threshold of 500 V. The SiC common SJ VDMOS (C-SJ VDMOS) was proven to be sensitive to high-energy heavy-ion and represents comparative SEB performance compared with the SiC C-VDMOS. The robustness of the SiC SJ VDMOS with different single buffer layer (SBL) designs against a heavy-ion was simulated. It is found that the maximum temperature in the source metal/SiC interface and bottom of the structure could be compromised by the thickness of the buffer layer. As a result, the SiC SJ VDMOS with an optimal SBL exhibited a severe degeneration threshold of 800 V, which was a 60% increase compared to the SiC C-SJ VDMOS.

An equation-of-state-meter for CBM using PointNet

A novel method for identifying the nature of QCD transitions in heavy-ion collision experiments is introduced. PointNet based Deep Learning (DL) models are developed to classify the equation of state (EoS) that drives the hydrodynamic evolution of the system created in Au-Au collisions at 10 AGeV. The DL models were trained and evaluated in different hypothetical experimental situations. A decreased performance is observed when more realistic experimental effects (acceptance cuts and decreased resolutions) are taken into account. It is shown that the performance can be improved by combining multiple events to make predictions. The PointNet based models trained on the reconstructed tracks of charged particles from the CBM detector simulation discriminate a crossover transition from a first order phase transition with an accuracy of up to 99.8%. The models were subjected to several tests to evaluate the dependence of its performance on the centrality of the collisions and physical parameters of fluid dynamic simulations. The models are shown to work in a broad range of centralities (b=0–7 fm). However, the performance is found to improve for central collisions (b=0–3 fm). There is a drop in the performance when the model parameters lead to reduced duration of the fluid dynamic evolution or when less fraction of the medium undergoes the transition. These effects are due to the limitations of the underlying physics and the DL models are shown to be superior in its discrimination performance in comparison to conventional mean observables.

Spin Hall effect in heavy-ion collisions

Spin Hall effect (SHE) is the generation of spin current due to an electric field, and has been observed in a variety of materials. In this work, we use linear response theory to verify that the analogous spin Hall current can be induced by chemical potential and temperature gradient, both of which are present in hot and dense nuclear matter created in heavy-ion collisions. We propose to measure ``directed spin flow'', the first Fourier coefficients of local spin polarization of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ $(\overline{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}})$ hyperon, at central collisions to probe spin Hall current in heavy-ion collision experiments. We benchmark the magnitude of the induced ``directed spin flow'' at two representatively collisions energies, namely ${\sqrt{s}}_{NN}=200\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$ and ${\sqrt{s}}_{NN}=19.6\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$, by employing a phenomenologically motivated freeze-out prescription. At both beam energies, the resulting ``directed spin flow'' ranges from ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ to ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$, and is very sensitive to the rapidity.

重离子在14-nm FinFET SRAM器件引起的单粒子翻转

The characteristic of single-event upset(SEU) in a 14-nm bulk fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) static random access memory(SRAM) is investigated by heavy-ion experiments. The linear energy transfer(LET) threshold 0.1 MeV/(mg/cm2) is obtained by fitting the SEU cross-section using the Weibull function. The contribution of multiple-bit upset(MBU) is investigated. The results show that when the LET is equal to 40.3 MeV/(mg/cm2), greater than 95% of SEU comes from the MBU. Additionally, the SEU cross-section of the FinFET SRAM presents anisotropies for incident angles associated with the fin direction. This research has a certain kind of guiding role in designing of radiation-hardened complementary metal-oxide semiconductor(CMOS) integrated circuits(ICs) based on FinFET technology.

Binding energy shifts from heavy-ion experiments in a nuclear statistical equilibrium model

Chemical constants extracted from \(^{124}\)Xe+ \(^{124}\)Sn collisions at 32 AMeV are compared to the predictions of an extended nuclear statistical equilibrium model including mean-field interactions and in-medium binding energy shifts for the light (\(Z\le 2\)) clusters. The ion species and density dependence of the in-medium modification is directly extracted from the experimental data. We show that the shift increases with the mass of the cluster and the density of the medium, and we provide a simple linear fit for future use in astrophysical simulations in the framework of the CompOSE data base. The resulting mass fractions are computed in representative thermodynamic conditions relevant for supernova and neutron star mergers. A comparison to the results of a similar analysis of the same data performed in the framework of a relativistic mean-field model shows a good agreement at low density, but significant discrepancies close to the Mott dissolution of clusters in the dense medium.

Measurement of L-shell X-ray production cross sections in 89Y, 158Gd and 209Bi due to 0.3 MeV/u – 1.0 MeV/u 12C ions

Experimental heavy ion induced X–ray production cross sections in matter continue to be of importance for both fundamental ion-atom collision studies as well as practical applications such as in nuclear analytical techniques. This work presents results of L-shell X-ray production cross section measurements in 89Y, 158Gd and 209Bi due to 4 MeV–12 MeV 12Cq + projectile ions. Experimental data are compared with theoretical calculations based on the ECPSSR, ECPSSR + EC and ECPSSR-UA models. Data show fairly good, albeit energy dependent agreement with the different models for yttrium and gadolinium cross sections. For bismuth, all three models overestimate data by an almost constant factor of two. The effect of multiple ionization on the l-line intensity ratios is also presented for gadolinium and bismuth targets.