Spin Effects in Intermediate-energy Heavy-ion Collisions

Abstract: In this paper, we report and extend our recent work where the nucleon spin-orbit interaction and its spin degree of freedom were introduced explicitly for the first time in the isospin-dependent Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck transport model for heavy-ion reactions. Despite of the significant cancellation of the time-even and time-odd spin-related mean-field potentials from the spin-orbit interaction,an appreciable local spin polarization is observed in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies because
of the dominating role of the time-odd terms. It is also found that the spin up-down differential transverse flow in heavy-ion collisions is a useful probe of the strength, density dependence, and isospin dependence of the in-medium spin-orbit interaction, and its magnitude is still considerable even at smaller systems.