Elliptic Anisotropy v(2) May Be Dominated by Particle Escape instead of Hydrodynamic Flow

Lin, Z. W. and He, L. and Edmonds, T. and Liu, F. and Molnár, Dénes (2016) Elliptic Anisotropy v(2) May Be Dominated by Particle Escape instead of Hydrodynamic Flow. NUCLEAR PHYSICS A, 956. pp. 316-319. ISSN 0375-9474

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Abstract

It is commonly believed that azimuthal anisotropies in relativistic heavy ion collisions are generated by hydrody- namic evolution of the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma. Here we use transport models to study how azimuthal anisotropies depend on the number of collisions that each parton suffers. We find that the majority of v2 comes from the anisotropic escape of partons, not from the parton collective flow, for semi-central Au+Au collisions at 200A GeV. As expected, the fraction of v2 from the anisotropic particle escape is even higher for smaller systems such as d+Au. Our transport model results also confirm that azimuthal anisotropies would be dominated by hydrodynamic flow at unrealistically-high parton cross sections. Our finding thus naturally explains the similarity of azimuthal anisotropies in small and large systems; however, it presents a challenge to the paradigm of anisotropic flow.

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