Microscopic study of energy and centrality dependence of transverse collective flow in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The centrality dependence of directed and elliptic flow in light and heavy systems of colliding nuclei is studied within two microscopic transport models at energies from 1 AGeV to 160 A GeV. The pion directed flow has negative slope in the midrapidity range irrespective of bombarding energy and mass number of the colliding ions. In contrast, the directed flow of nucleons vanishes and even develops antiflow in the midrapidity range in (semi)peripheral collisions at energies around 11.6 A GeV and higher. The origin of the disappearance of flow is linked to nuclear shadowing. Since the effect is stronger for a light system, it can be distinguished from the similar phenomenon caused by the quark-gluon plasma formation. In the latter case the disappearance of the flow due to the softening of the equation of state should be most pronounced in collisions of heavy ions. The centrality dependence of the elliptic flow shows that the maximum in the <v_2(b)> distribution is shifted to very peripheral events with rising incident energy, in accord with experimental data. This is an indication of the transition from baryonic to mesonic degrees of freedom in hot hadronic matter.

30 pages incl. 17 figures, to be published in the Physical Review C

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• Probing the equation of state with pions
• Anisotropic flow of charged and identified hadrons in the quark-gluon string model for Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Elliptic flow at collider energies and cascade string models: The role of hard processes and multi-Pomeron exchanges
• Collective Flow in Heavy-Ion Collisions from AGS to SPS
• Differential Flow of Protons in Au+Au Collisions at AGS Energies
• Transverse momentum dependence of directed particle flow at 160 AGeV
• Anisotropic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at LHC from the quark gluon string model with parton rearrangement
• Pseudorapidity shape of elliptic flow as signature for fast equilibration in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at energies up to sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Elliptic Flow and Dissipation in Heavy-Ion Collisions at E_{lab} = (1--160)A GeV
• Microscopic description of anisotropic flow in relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Anisotropic flow of strange particles at RHIC
• Transition to meson-dominated matter at RHIC. Consequences for kaon flow
• Phi meson production at RHIC
• Directed flow in heavy-ion collisions at NICA: what is interesting to measure?
• Anisotropic flow of strange particles in heavy ion collisions at RHIC energies