Mass ordering of differential elliptic flow and its violation for ϕ mesons

Tetsufumi Hirano, Ulrich Heinz, Dmitri Kharzeev, Roy Lacey, and Yasushi Nara
Phys. Rev. C 77, 044909 – Published 28 April 2008

Abstract

We simulate the dynamics of Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) with a hybrid model that treats the dense early quark-gluon plasma (QGP) stage macroscopically as an ideal fluid but models the dilute late hadron resonance gas (HG) microscopically using a hadronic cascade. By comparing with a pure hydrodynamic approach we identify effects of hadronic viscosity on the transverse momentum spectra and differential elliptic flow v2(pT). We investigate the dynamical origins of the observed mass ordering of v2(pT) for identified hadrons, focusing on dissipative effects during the late hadronic stage. Within our approach, we find that, at RHIC energies, much of the finally observed mass splitting is generated during the hadronic stage, due to buildup of additional radial flow. The ϕ meson, having a small interaction cross section, does not fully participate in this additional flow. As a result, it violates the mass-ordering pattern for v2(pT) that is observed for other hadron species. We also show that the early decoupling of the ϕ meson from the hadronic rescattering dynamics leads to interesting and unambiguous features in the pT dependence of the nuclear suppression factor RAA and of the ϕ/p ratio.

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  • Received 31 October 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.77.044909

©2008 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Tetsufumi Hirano1,*, Ulrich Heinz2,3, Dmitri Kharzeev4, Roy Lacey5, and Yasushi Nara6

  • 1Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
  • 2Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA
  • 3CERN, Physics Department, Theory Division, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
  • 4Nuclear Theory Group, Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973-5000, USA
  • 5Department of Chemistry, SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794-3400, USA
  • 6Akita International University, 193-2 Okutsubakidai, Yuwa-Tsubakigawa, Akita 010-1211, Japan

  • *Correspond to hirano@phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

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Vol. 77, Iss. 4 — April 2008

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