Charm quarks are more hydrodynamic than light quarks in final-state elliptic flow

Abstract

We study the charm quark elliptic flow ($v_2$) in heavy ion as well as small system collisions by tracking the evolution history of quarks of different flavors within a multi-phase transport model. The charm quark $v_2$ is studied as a function of the number of collisions the charm quark suffers with other quarks and then compared to the $v_2$ of lighter quarks. We find that the common escape mechanism is at work for both the charm and light quark $v_2$. However, contrary to the naive expectation, the hydrodynamics-type flow is found to contribute more to the final state charm $v_2$ than light quark $v_2$. This could be explained by the smaller average deflection angle the heavier charm quark undergoes in each collision, so that heavy quarks need more scatterings to accumulate a significant $v_2$, while lighter quarks can more easily change directions with scatterings with their $v_2$ coming more from the escape mechanism. Our finding thus suggests that the charm $v_2$ is a better probe for studying the hydrodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

10 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Systematic Measurements of Identified Particle Spectra in pp, d+Au and Au+Au Collisions from STAR
• Elliptic and triangular flow in p+Pb and peripheral Pb+Pb collisions from parton scatterings
• Effect of an anisotropic escape mechanism on elliptic flow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Further developments of a multi-phase transport model for relativistic nuclear collisions
• Prompt and non-prompt $J/\psi$ elliptic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{\text{NN}}}}=5.02$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• The Collectivity of Heavy Mesons in Proton-Nucleus Collisions
• Improvement of heavy flavor productions in a multi-phase transport model updated with modern nPDFs
• Exploring the Collective Phenomenon at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Measurements of azimuthal anisotropies at forward and backward rapidity with muons in high-multiplicity p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=8.16$ TeV
• Azimuthal anisotropy of jet particles in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV
• Constraining input parameters of AMPT model with $\varphi$ meson production
• Recent Findings from Heavy-Flavor Angular Correlation Measurements in Hadronic Collisions
• Elliptic anisotropy of open-charm hadrons from parton scatterings in p--Pb collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider