Effects of Pauli blocking on pion production in central collisions of neutron-rich nuclei

Abstract

Pauli blocking is carefully investigated for the processes of $NN \rightarrow N \Delta$ and $\Delta \rightarrow N \pi$ in heavy-ion collisions, aiming at a more precise prediction of the $\pi^-/ \pi^+$ ratio which is an important observable to constrain the high-density symmetry energy. We use the AMD+JAM approach, which combines the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics for the time evolution of nucleons and the JAM model to treat processes for $\Delta$ resonances and pions. As is known in general transport-code simulations, it is difficult to treat Pauli blocking very precisely due to unphysical fluctuations and additional smearing of the phase-space distribution function, when Pauli blocking is treated in the standard method of JAM. We propose an improved method in AMD+JAM to use the Wigner function precisely calculated in AMD as the blocking probability. Different Pauli blocking methods are compared in heavy-ion collisions of neutron-rich nuclei, ${}^{132}\mathrm{Sn}+{}^{124}\mathrm{Sn}$, at 270 MeV/nucleon. With the more accurate method, we find that Pauli blocking is stronger, in particular for the neutron in the final state in $NN \rightarrow N \Delta$ and $ \Delta \to N\pi$, compared to the case with a proton in the final state. Consequently, the $\pi^-/\pi^+$ ratio becomes higher when the Pauli blocking is improved, the effect of which is found to be comparable to the sensitivity to the high-density symmetry energy.