Testing the impact of electromagnetic fields on the directed flow of constituent quarks in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

It has been proposed that strong electromagnetic fields produced in the early stages of heavy-ion collisions can lead to splitting of the rapidity-odd directed flow of positive and negative hadrons. For light hadrons, the interpretation of such measurements is complicated by the low magnitude of directed flow as well as by ambiguities arising from transported quarks. To overcome these complications, we propose measurements using only hadrons carrying produced quarks ($\bar{u},\bar{d},s,\bar{s}$). We discuss how to identify the kinematics where such hadrons are produced via the coalescence mechanism and therefore their flow is the sum of the flow of their constituent quarks. With this sum rule verified for certain combinations of hadrons, the expected systematic violation of this rule with increasing electric charge can be measured, which could be a consequence of the electromagnetic fields produced in the collisions. Our approach can be tested with the high statistics data from Phase II of the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

9 pages, 5 figures, v2: figure 2 updated, v3: corrected one citation, v4: version accepted in journal

References in corpus (6)

• Global polarization of $\Xi$ and $\Omega$ hyperons in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV
• Examination of the directed flow puzzle in heavy-ion collisions
• Charge-dependent directed flow in asymmetric nuclear collisions
• Charge-dependent flow as evidence of strong electromagnetic fields in heavy-ion collisions
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Charge-dependent directed flows in heavy-ion collisions by Boltzmann-Maxwell equations
• Electric-charge-dependent directed flow splitting of produced quarks in Au+Au collisions