Can the energy dependence of elliptic flow reveal the QGP phase transition?

Abstract

Ideal hydrodynamic simulations are performed to compute the evolution with collision energy of hadron spectra and elliptic flow between AGS and LHC energies. We argue that viscous effects should decrease with increasing energy, improving the applicability of ideal fluid dynamics at higher energies. We show that the increasing radial flow at higher energies pushes the elliptic flow to larger transverse momenta, leading to a peaking and subsequent decrease of the elliptic flow at fixed p_T with increasing collision energy, independent of whether or not there is a phase transition in the equation of state.

Final version, to appear in the proceedings of Quark Matter 2009: 21th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus Nucleus Collisions (QM 2009), Knoxville, TN, Mar.30 - Apr.4, 2009. This version 2 uses larger fonts in Fig. 1c; no other changes

References in corpus (8)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Conformal Relativistic Viscous Hydrodynamics: Applications to RHIC results at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Multiplicity scaling in ideal and viscous hydrodynamics
• Has the QCD Critical Point been Signaled by Observations at RHIC ?
• Extracting the QGP viscosity from RHIC data -- a status report from viscous hydrodynamics
• Energy and system size dependence of charged particle elliptic flow and $v_2/\eps$ scaling
• Hydrodynamic radial and elliptic flow in heavy-ion collisions from AGS to LHC energies
• An estimate for the location of QCD critical end point

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Radial and elliptic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider from viscous hydrodynamic
• Collision Energy Dependence of Viscous Hydrodynamic Flow in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Beam energy dependence of squeeze-out effect on the directed and elliptic flow in Au+Au collisions at high baryon density region
• Effects of mean-field and the softening of equation of state on elliptic flow in Au+Au collision at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5 GeV from JAM model