arXiv2026
Short-range correlations (SRCs) dominate the nuclear force at short distances, including the repulsive core and intermediate-range attraction, and are one of the most fascinating aspects of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction. In this work, we investigate the effects of SRCs on the final-state observables in $^{16}$O+$^{16}$O collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.36$~TeV, using the iEBE-VISHNU hybrid model with {T\raisebox{-0.5ex}{R}ENTo} initial conditions. We embed the nucleon configurations of $^{16}$O generated from variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulations with realistic SRCs in the initial stage, along with uncorrelated VMC samples and Woods--Saxon distributions implementing a hard repulsive core or short-range attraction as comparison runs. We find that SRCs reduce both $v_2\{2\}$ and $v_2\{4\}$ in the most central collisions, with the decrease of $v_2\{4\}$ being more pronounced due to the event-by-event flow fluctuations. Meanwhile, SRCs noticeably enhance the correlation between the elliptic flow and the mean transverse momentum, $ρ_2(v_2^2,[p_T])$. These effects are mainly attributed to the strong repulsive core of the SRCs, which suppresses the probability of finding nucleon pairs at short relative distances and renders the initial geometry more uniform. This interpretation is supported by the calculations based on Woods--Saxon distributions with a hard repulsive core, which reproduce similar results, while the contribution from a pure intermediate-range attraction is negligible. Our results demonstrate that relativistic nuclear collisions provide a complementary probe of the short-range structure of the nuclear force, beyond the traditional nuclear experiments at low energies.