Clusters in Heavy-Ion Collision Dynamics

Clusters are copiously formed in heavy-ion collisions. In typical cases of central collisions at several ten to several hundred MeV/nucleon, it has been known for a long time in experiments that about 80-90% of protons in the system are bound in light clusters and heavier fragments in the final state. This has been a challenging problem for transport theories which are normally based on single-nucleon motions. Even in molecular dynamics approaches, the clusters should be explicitly treated as quantum correlations. I will review how clusters are introduced in antisymmetrized molecular dynamics, and discuss the strong impacts of cluster correlations on reaction dynamics and observables.