TY  - JOUR
A1  - Steinheimer, Jan
A1  - Pang, Long-Gang
A1  - Zhou, Kai
A1  - Koch, Volker
A1  - Randrup, Jørgen
A1  - Stöcker, Horst
T1  - A machine learning study to identify spinodal clumping in high energy nuclear collisions
T2  - Journal of high energy physics
N2  - The coordinate and momentum space configurations of the net baryon number in heavy ion collisions that undergo spinodal decomposition, due to a first-order phase transition, are investigated using state-of-the-art machine-learning methods. Coordinate space clumping, which appears in the spinodal decomposition, leaves strong characteristic imprints on the spatial net density distribution in nearly every event which can be detected by modern machine learning techniques. On the other hand, the corresponding features in the momentum distributions cannot clearly be detected, by the same machine learning methods, in individual events. Only a small subset of events can be systematically differ- entiated if only the momentum space information is available. This is due to the strong similarity of the two event classes, with and without spinodal decomposition. In such sce- narios, conventional event-averaged observables like the baryon number cumulants signal a spinodal non-equilibrium phase transition. Indeed the third-order cumulant, the skewness, does exhibit a peak at the beam energy (Elab = 3–4 A GeV), where the transient hot and dense system created in the heavy ion collision reaches the first-order phase transition.
KW  - Heavy Ion Phenomenology
KW  - QCD Phenomenology
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/70154
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-701547
SN  - 1029-8479
SN  - 1126-6708
VL  - 2019
IS  - 122
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin ; Heidelberg
ER  -