Speaker
Description
Collisions of light nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide a unique opportunity to investigate the collective dynamics and initial-state properties of strongly interacting matter in relatively small collision systems. In this work, we study the production of charged particles and collective flow in O+O and Ne+Ne collisions at 5.36 TeV. We first validate our framework by reproducing the experimentally measured centrality dependence of charged-particle multiplicity and elliptic flow for both collision systems. The comparison with available LHC measurements provides a benchmark for the subsequent investigation of the radial flow coefficient v_0(p_T).
Using the validated framework, we calculate v_0(p_T) in O+O and Ne+Ne collisions and investigate its sensitivity to the collision system. The results indicate a non-trivial system dependence of v_0(p_T), suggesting that the observable may retain information about the underlying geometry and dynamical evolution of light-ion collisions. A systematic comparison between O+O and Ne+Ne is presented to identify features that can distinguish the two systems. Our study demonstrates the potential of flow observables in light-nucleus collisions as probes of initial-state geometry and collective dynamics, and provides predictions for future measurements at the LHC.