Impact of the pre-equilibrium phase for the determination of nuclear geometry in high-energy isobar collisions

Ultrarelativistic isobar collisions have been proposed as a useful tool to investigate nuclear structure. These systems are not created in equilibrium, rather undergo a prethermalization phase. In this phase, some of the initial structure information may be lost and additional effects introduced. The objective of this paper is to study this possibility in the extreme case of a "free-streaming" pre-equilibrium phase. We do this by computing estimators for ratios of various measured (or measurable) quantities (elliptic and triangular flows, mean transverse momentum and associated cumulants, correlators between elliptic or triangular flows and mean transverse momentum, symmetric cumulant and two-plane correlator) and study their sensitivity to the duration of the free-streaming phase. We find that the correlators between elliptic or triangular flows and mean transverse momentum, the so-called ρ_2 and ρ_3, are indeed sensitive to the duration of the free-streaming phase and that the normalized symmetric cumulant, ϵ NSC(2,3) might also depend on this duration.