Simulations of Magnetic Fields in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

The magnetic fields in relativistic heavy ion collisions can get up to 10^15 T[1]. These fields become so huge because charges (protons) are moving at very high speeds very close to the observation point. In this thesis a program used to simulate relativistic heavy ion collisions, TRENTo (Reduced Thickness Event-by-Event Nuclear Topology [2]), is used to simulate the magnetic field in heavy ion collisions, in order to study the spatial and time dependence of the magnetic field in such collisions. TRENTo is a nice tool to simulate events because it already simulates different events by randomly placing nucleons in accordance to the Woods-Saxon distribution, an approximate nucleon density distribution for heavy atoms. The simulations carried out in this thesis give rise to a magnetic field of up to 10^16 T. There are several differences between the results from TRENTo and the existing literature, but TRENTo seems to be working as intended, and gives results which are expected.