Signals of α clusters in ¹⁶O+¹⁶O collisions at the LHC from relativistic hydrodynamic simulations*

Abstract In relativistic heavy ion collisions, the fluctuations of initial entropy density convert to the correlations of final state hadrons in momentum space through the collective expansion of strongly interacting QCD matter. Using a (3+1)D viscous hydrodynamic program, CLVisc, we consider whether the nuclear structure, which provides initial state fluctuations as well as correlations, can affect the final state of heavy ion collisions, and whether one can find signals of α cluster structures in oxygen using final state observables in collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. For the initial nucleon distributions in oxygen nuclei, we compare three different configurations, a tetrahedral structure with four-α clusters, the deformed Woods-Saxon distribution, and a spherical symmetric Woods-Saxon distribution. Our results show that the charged multiplicity as a function of centrality and the elliptic flow at the most central collisions using the four-α structure differs from those with the Woods-Saxon and deformed Woods-Saxon distributions, which may help to identify α clustering structures in oxygen nuclei.