POSTPONED

Seminar in Hadronic Physics

The speed of sound of dense nuclear matter from heavy-ion collisions

Agnieszka Sorensen

Institute for Nuclear Physics
University of Washington

The equation of state (EOS) of dense nuclear matter has been the center of numerous research efforts over the years. While multiple studies indicate that the EOS is relatively soft around the saturation density of nuclear matter, recent analyses of neutron star data strongly suggest that in the cores of neutron stars, where densities may reach several times that of normal nuclear matter, the EOS becomes very stiff — so stiff, in fact, that the speed of sound squared may substantially exceed the conformal limit of 1/3. This striking behavior inspires the research I will present in this talk. I will discuss a novel way of using higher moments of the baryon number distribution, measured in experiments, to infer the speed of sound in dense nuclear matter created in low-energy heavy-ion collisions. I will then present the framework I developed to enable comprehensive hadronic transport studies of the influence of the dense nuclear matter EOS on experimental observables, and I will discuss implications for the speed of sound of dense nuclear matter based on a recent analysis using this framework.