Anisotropies in momentum space at finite Shear Viscosity in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how anisotropies in momentum space, specifically elliptic flow and higher harmonics, depend on shear viscosity and freeze-out dynamics in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC energies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effects of shear viscosity and freeze-out procedures on momentum anisotropies, highlighting the importance of freeze-out dynamics in scaling behaviors.

Findings

$v_2(p_T)$ weakly depends on freeze-out scheme

$v_4(p_T)$ strongly depends on $ta/s$ and freeze-out dynamics

Estimated shear viscosity to entropy ratio is around 1-2 in units of 4

Abstract

Within a parton cascade we investigate the dependence of anisotropies in momentum space, namely the elliptic flow $v_2=<cos(2\phi)>$ and the $v_4=<cos(4\phi)>$, on both the finite shear viscosity $\eta$ and the freeze-out (f.o.) dynamics at the RHIC energy of 200 AGeV. In particular it is discussed the impact of the f.o. dynamics looking at two different procedures: switching-off the collisions when the energy density goes below a fixed value or reducing the cross section according to the increase in $\eta/s$ from a QGP phase to a hadronic one. We address the relation between the scaling of $v_2(p_T)$ with the eccentricity $\epsilon_x$ and with the integrated elliptic flow. We show that the breaking of the $v_2(p_T)/\epsilon_x$ scaling is not coming mainly from the finite $\eta/s$ but from the f.o. dynamics and that the $v_2(p_T)$ is weakly dependent on the f.o. scheme. On the other hand the $v_4(p_T)$ is found to be much more dependent on both the $\eta/s$ and the f.o. dynamics and hence is indicated to put better constraints on the properties of the QGP. A first semi-quantitative analysis show that both $v_2$ and $v_4$ (with the smooth f.o.) consistently indicate a plasma with $4\pi \eta/s \sim 1-2$.