Probing the α cluster of ¹⁶O with the relativistic ¹⁶O+¹⁶O collisions has raised great interest in the heavy ion community. However, the effects of the α cluster on the soft hadron observables vary largely among different studies. In this paper, we explain the differences by the compactness of the α cluster in oxygen, using iEBE-VISHNU hydrodynamic simulations with different initial state α cluster configurations. We also find several observables, such as the intensive skewness of the [pT] correlator Γ_pT, the harmonic flows v₂2, v₂4, v₃2, and the vₙ²-δ[pT] correlations ρ(v₂²,[pT]), ρ(v₃²,[pT]) in ¹⁶O+¹⁶O collisions are sensitive to the compactness of the α cluster in the colliding nuclei, which can be used to constrain the configurations of ¹⁶O in the future. Our study serves as an important step toward the quantitative exploration of the α cluster configuration in the light nuclei with relativistic heavy ion collisions.
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Wang et al. (2024) studied this question.
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