Effects of mean-field momentum dependence on pion production in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions

Pion production in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies provides an important probe of the collision dynamics and nuclear matter equation of state, especially the high-density behavior of the symmetry energy. Using the lattice Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck transport model with a recently developed nuclear effective interaction based on the so-called N5LO Skyrme pseudopotential, we investigate the effects of the momentum dependence of nucleon mean-field potentials on the pion production in Au+Au collisions at a beam energy of 1.23 GeV/nucleon. We find that a stronger momentum dependence, for which the nucleon mean-field potentials increase faster with momentum, generally suppresses pion production. This feature can be understood in terms of the mean-field-induced modification of nucleon high-momentum phase space during the compression stage: a stronger momentum dependence can reduce the relative fraction of high-momentum nucleons in heavy-ion collisions, thereby suppressing the production of Δ resonances and pions.