Azimuthal anisotropy and multiplicities of hard photons and free nucleons in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions

Anisotropic flow can offer significant information of evolution dynamics in heavy-ion collisions. A systematic study of the directed flow v1 and elliptic flow v2 of hard photons and free nucleons is performed for 40Ca + 40Ca collisions in a framework of isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics (IQMD) model. The study firstly reveals that thermal photons emitted in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions have the behaviors of directed and elliptic flows. The interesting phenomena of incident energy dependence of v1 and v2 for thermal photons in central collisions also confirmed that it can be regarded as a good probe of evolution dynamics. Moreover, the multiplicities of hard photons and free nucleons and their correlation are also investigated. We find that direct photon emission is positively related to free nucleons emission, however, there exists an anti-correlation for thermal photons with free nucleons.