Abstract
Recent beam energy scan experiments at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider by the STAR Collaboration [Phys. Lett. B 827, 137003 (2022) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 202303 (2022)] found that hadronic interactions dominate the collective flow and the proton cumulant ratios are driven by baryon number conservation in a region of high baryon density in GeV reactions, indicating that the dense medium formed in such collisions is likely hadronic matter. Within an updated a relativistic transport model with momentum dependent isoscalar and isovector single-nucleon mean-field potentials corresponding to different symmetry energies at suprasaturation densities, the , and ratios are studied for central collisions at GeV, where the maximum central density reaches about . The doubly strange ratio is found to have the strongest sensitivity to the variation of high-density nuclear symmetry energy. Thus, the ratio in relativistic heavy-ion reactions at GeV may help probe sensitively the poorly known symmetry energy of dense neutron-rich matter critically important for understanding various properties of neutron stars.
- Received 7 July 2022
- Accepted 27 July 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.106.024902
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