Simulations of Magnetic Fields in Heavy Ion Collisions
Summary
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.