Elliptic flow and incomplete equilibration at RHIC

By R. Bhalerao, J. Blaizot, N. Borghini, J. Ollitrault. 2005

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We argue that RHIC data, in particular those on the anisotropic flow coefficients v 2 and v 4 , suggest that the matter produced in the early stages of nucleus–nucleus collisions is incompletely thermalized. We interpret the parameter ( 1 / S ) ( d N / d y ) , where S is the transverse area of the collision zone and d N / d y the multiplicity density, as an indicator of the number of collisions per particle at the time when elliptic flow is established, and hence as a measure of the degree of equilibration. This number serves as a control parameter which can be varied experimentally by changing the system size, the centrality or the beam energy. We provide predictions for Cu–Cu collisions at RHIC as well as for Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba05dbf42d34c46e5395ba8447b9fb1775b1f7c7

Citations in the corpus

• Properties of hot and dense matter from relativistic heavy ion collisions (2015, unknown): “This is indeed the case, as we can see using the following argument [221].”