Recent STAR measurements of ${}^{238}\mathrm{U}+{}^{238}\mathrm{U}/{}^{197}\mathrm{Au}+{}^{197}\mathrm{Au}$ ratios provide a sensitive test of nuclear deformation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, but the elliptic-flow, triangular-flow, and transverse-momentum-related observables are not simultaneously described within existing calculations. We use three-dimensional lattice covariant density functional theory (CDFT) with pairing correlations to provide microscopic density distributions of both ${}^{238}\mathrm{U}$ and ${}^{197}\mathrm{Au}$ for event-by-event hydrodynamic simulations. The CDFT densities substantially improve the description of the ultracentral elliptic-flow ratio, while the octupole-deformed uranium configuration yields a triangular-flow ratio larger than that of the reflection-symmetric configuration. In contrast, the transverse-momentum-related ratios remain difficult to describe within the present framework. We further show that variations of the density of the odd-mass ${}^{197}\mathrm{Au}$ reference nucleus can produce changes in the triangular-flow ratio comparable to the separation between the two uranium configurations. These results demonstrate that both the uranium structure and the reference-nucleus density must be controlled before quantitative nuclear-structure constraints can be extracted from high-energy collisions.

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• Collective flow
• Nucleon distribution
• Quark-gluon plasma
• Relativistic heavy-ion collisions