2013/05/15 by R. Lacey, Lacey, Roy A., A. Taranenko +13 · 2 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1305.3341
openalex publication_date 2013/05/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The flow harmonics v2,3 for charged hadrons, are studied for a broad range of centrality selections and beam collision energies in Au+Au (√sNN= 7.7 - 200 GeV) and Pb+Pb (√sNN= 2.76 TeV) collisions. They validate the characteristic signature expected for the system size dependence of viscous damping at each collision energy studied. The extracted viscous coefficients, that encode the magnitude of the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density η/s, are observed to decrease to an apparent minimum as the collision energy is increased from √sNN= 7.7 to approximately 62.4 GeV; thereafter, they show a slow increase with √sNN up to 2.76 TeV. This pattern of viscous damping provides the first experimental constraint for η/s in the temperature-baryon chemical potential (T, μB) plane, and could be an initial indication for decay trajectories which lie close to the critical end point in the phase diagram for nuclear matter.