Hadronic dissipative effects on transverse dynamics at RHIC

TL;DR

This paper uses a hybrid simulation model to study how hadronic dissipative effects influence the transverse flow patterns in RHIC heavy-ion collisions, revealing the hadronic stage's role in mass ordering of flow coefficients.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid modeling approach combining ideal fluid dynamics for quark-gluon plasma with microscopic hadronic cascade, highlighting the hadronic stage's impact on flow observables.

Findings

Mass-ordering of v2(pT) largely develops during the hadronic phase.

The phi meson violates mass-ordering due to small hadronic cross section.

Hadronic dissipative effects significantly influence transverse flow patterns.

Abstract

We simulate the dynamics of Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) with a hybrid model that treats the quark-gluon plasma macroscopically as an ideal fluid, but models the hadron resonance gas microscopically using a hadronic cascade. We find that much of the mass-ordering pattern for v_2(p_T) observed at RHIC is generated during the hadronic stage due to build-up of additional radial flow. We also find that the mass-ordering pattern is violated for phi meson due to small interaction cross section in the hadron resonance gas.