Effects of density-and momentum-dependent potentials in Au+Au collisions at intermediate energies

Based on an isospin-dependent transport model, the effects of the density-and momentum-dependent potentials are studied by simulating Au on Au collisions at 90, 120, 150 and 400 MeV/nucleon. It is found that the calculated results overestimate the experimental data on the directed flow and underestimate the data on the elliptic flow for protons. The impact of the density-and momentum-dependent potentials is observed in the mid-rapidity region of the final spectra. At 90 MeV/nucleon, the momentum-dependent potential has a larger impact on the observables than the density-dependent potential, and the elliptic flow has a higher value with the positive effective mass splitting. At 400 MeV/nucleon, however, the opposite is observed. The rapidity dependence of the elliptic flow for protons is sensitive to the symmetry energy. A soft symmetry energy corresponds to a higher value of the proton elliptic flow.