Anisotropic transverse flow and the quark-hadron phase transition

By P. Kolb, J. Sollfrank, Ulrich Heinz. 2000

339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamics with exact longitudinal boost-invariance to study the influence of collision centrality and initial energy density on the transverse flow pattern and the angular distributions of particles emitted near midrapidity in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. We concentrate on radial flow and the elliptic flow coefficientv2 as functions of the impact parameter and of the collision energy. We demonstrate that the finally observed elliptic flow is established earlier in the collision than the observed radial flow and thus probes the equation of state at higher energy densities. We point out that a phase transition from hadronic matter to a color-deconfined quark-gluon plasma leads to nonmonotonic behaviour in both beam energy and impact parameter dependences which, if observed, can be used to identify such a phase transition. Our calculations span collision energies from the Brookhaven AGS (Alternating Gradient Synchrotron) to beyond the LHC (Large Hadron Collider); the QGP phase transition signature is predicted between the lowest available SPS (CERN Super Proton Synchrotron) and the highest RHIC (Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) energies. To optimize the chances for applicability of hydrodynamics we suggest to study the excitation function of flow anisotropies in central uranium-uranium collisions in the sideon-side collision geometry.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0684d0e91b67ef7359351c974d03a64748fa535d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS TRIGGERED BY A QUARK–HADRON PHASE TRANSITION DURING THE EARLY POST-BOUNCE PHASE (2010, background): “In heavy-ion collisions, the hot fireball of nuclear matter expands within 10−23 seconds (Kolb et al. 2000) and thereby prevents the appearance of net strangeness via weak reactions.”
Collective flow and hydrodynamics in large and small systems at the LHC (2017, background): “The traditional Glauber model assumes zero transverse velocity at the starting time and constructs the initial entropy/energy density profiles from a mixture of the wounded nucleon and binary collision densities [102].”
Formation of dense partonic matter in relativistic nucleus–nucleus collisions at RHIC: Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX Collaboration (2004, background): “The calculations follow the prescription of [66] where the produced particles are allowed to free-stream at first and reach local equilibrium only after some time delay.”