2000/02/17 by L. V. Bravina, L.V. Bravina, Amand Faessler +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.61.064902
published as Phys.Rev. C61 (2000) 064902 · 30 pages incl. 17 figures, to be published in the Physical Review C
arxiv created 2000/02/17 · openalex publication_date 2000/04/25 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The centrality dependence of directed and elliptic flow in light and heavy systems of colliding nuclei is studied within two microscopic transport models at energies from 1A GeV to 160A GeV. The pion-directed flow has negative slope in the midrapidity range irrespective of bombarding energy and mass number of the colliding ions. In contrast, the directed flow of nucleons vanishes and even develops antiflow in the midrapidity range in (semi)peripheral collisions at energies around 11.6A GeV and higher. The origin of the disappearance of flow is linked to nuclear shadowing. Since the effect is stronger for a light system, it can be distinguished from a similar phenomenon caused by quark-gluon plasma formation. In the latter case the disappearance of flow due to the softening of the equation of state should be most pronounced in collisions of heavy ions. The centrality dependence of the elliptic flow shows that the maximum in the 〈v2(b)〉 distribution is shifted to very peripheral events with rising incident energy, in accordance with experimental data. This is an indication of the transition from baryonic to mesonic degrees of freedom in hot hadronic matter.