Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma

2007/09/30 by Huichao Song, Ulrich W. Heinz · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2007.11.019

published as Phys.Lett.B658:279-283,2008 · 5 pages, incl. 4 figures. Fig.2 redrawn, several footnotes and references added. This version accepted by Physics Letters B

arxiv created 2007/12/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01

Abstract

We compute the time evolution of elliptic flow in non-central relativistic heavy-ion collisions, using a (2+1)-dimensional code with longitudinal boost-invariance to simulate viscous fluid dynamics in the causal Israel-Stewart formulation. We show that even ``minimal'' shear viscosity eta/s=hbar/(4pi) leads to a large reduction of elliptic flow compared to ideal fluid dynamics, raising questions about the interpretation of recent experimental data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

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• A "breathing'' octupole ²⁰⁸Pb nucleus: resolving the elliptical-to-triangular azimuthal anisotropy puzzle in ultracentral relativistic heavy ion collisions

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