Probing nucleon effective mass splitting with light particle emission

The main objective of this study was to investigate the impact of effective mass splitting on heavy-ion-collision observables. We first analyzed correlations between different nuclear matter parameters obtained from 119 effective Skyrme interaction sets. The values of the correlation coefficients illustrate that the magnitude of effective mass splitting is crucial for tight constraints on the symmetry energy via heavy-ion collisions. The 86 Kr + 208 Pb system at beam energies ranging from 25 to 200A MeV was simulated within the framework of the improved quantum molecular dynamics model (ImQMD-Sky). Our calculations show that the slopes of the spectra of ln [ Y (n)/ Y (p)] and ln [ Y (t)/ Y ( 3 He)], which are the logarithms of the neutron to proton and triton to helium-3 yield ratios, are directly related to effective mass splitting and can be used to probe the effective mass splitting.