Abstract
We report a precise measurement of the elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at with the ALICE detector at the LHC. The mesons are reconstructed at midrapidity () in the dielectron decay channel and at forward rapidity () in the dimuon channel, both down to zero transverse momentum. At forward rapidity, the elliptic flow of the is studied as a function of the transverse momentum and centrality. A positive is observed in the transverse momentum range in the three centrality classes studied and confirms with higher statistics our earlier results at in semicentral collisions. At midrapidity, the is investigated as a function of the transverse momentum in semicentral collisions and found to be in agreement with the measurements at forward rapidity. These results are compared to transport model calculations. The comparison supports the idea that at low the elliptic flow of the originates from the thermalization of charm quarks in the deconfined medium but suggests that additional mechanisms might be missing in the models.
- Received 27 September 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.242301
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
© 2017 CERN, for the ALICE Collaboration