2014/11/10 by Fernando G. Gardim, Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler, Matthew Luzum +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #nucl-th #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.91.034902
published as Phys. Rev. C 91, 034902 (2015) · 12 pages, 11 figures
arxiv created 2014/11/10 · arxiv updated 2015/03/11
We investigate the correlation between various aspects of the initial geometry of heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider energies and the final anisotropic flow, using v-USPhydro, a 2+1 event-by-event viscous relativistic hydrodynamical model. We test the extent of which shear and bulk viscosity affect the prediction of the final flow harmonics, vn, from the initial eccentricities, εn. We investigate in detail the flow harmonics v1 through v5 where we find that v1, v4, and v5 are dependent on more complicated aspects of the initial geometry that are especially important for the description of peripheral collisions, including a non-linear dependence on eccentricities as well as a dependence on shorter-scale features of the initial density. Furthermore, we compare our results to previous results from NeXSPheRIO, a 3+1 relativistic ideal hydrodynamical model that has a non-zero initial flow contribution, and find that the combined contribution from 3+1 dynamics and non-zero, fluctuating initial flow decreases the predictive ability of the initial eccentricities, in particular for very peripheral collisions, but also disproportionately in central collisions.