Saturation of elliptic flow and the transport opacity of the gluon plasma at RHIC

2001/04/30 by Dénes Molnár, Denes Molnar, Miklos Gyulassy +1 · 14 citations
Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Elliptic flow #Gluon #Heavy ion #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ion #Mathematics #Nuclear physics #Opacity #Optics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Plasma #Quantum mechanics #Saturation (graph theory) #Superconducting Materials and Applications #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0375-9474(01)01224-6

published as Nucl.Phys.A697:495-520,2002; Erratum-ibid.A703:893-894,2002 · Long overdue update with final published version + erratum (13 pages, 17 EPS figs)

openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · arxiv created 2003/12/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Differential elliptic flow and particle spectra are calculated taking into account the finite transport opacity of the gluon plasma produced in Au+Au at Ecm ~ 130 A GeV at RHIC. Covariant numerical solutions of the ultrarelativistic Boltzmann equation are obtained using the MPC parton cascade technique. For typical pQCD (~3 mb) elastic cross sections, extreme initial gluon densities, dN/deta ~ 15000, are required to reproduce the elliptic flow saturation pattern reported by STAR. However, we show that the solutions depend mainly on the transport opacity, χ=∫ dz σ_tρ_g, and thus the data can also be reproduced with dN/deta ~ 1000, but with extreme elastic parton cross sections, \~45 mb. We demonstrate that the spectra and elliptic flow are dominated by numerical artifacts unless parton subdivisions ~100-1000 are applied to retain Lorentz covariance for RHIC initial conditions.

Citations

• Next-to-leading order fragmentation functions for pions and kaons
• Equation of state and collision rate tests of parton cascade models
• Transverse momentum dependence of directed particle flow at160AGeV

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