Hydrodynamic analysis of heavy ion collisions at RHIC

TL;DR

This paper reviews hydrodynamic modeling of quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions at RHIC, emphasizing the importance of hadronic rescattering and predicting elliptic flow for phi mesons to understand the collision dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the significance of hadronic rescattering effects and provides predictions for phi meson elliptic flow to probe the flow after hadronization.

Findings

Hadronic rescattering significantly influences elliptic flow patterns.

Predicted phi meson elliptic flow to observe post-hadronization flow.

Hydrodynamic outputs applied to J/psi suppression and photon radiation.

Abstract

Current status of dynamical modeling of relativistic heavy ion collisions and hydrodynamic description of the quark gluon plasma is reported. We find the hadronic rescattering effect plays an important role in interpretation of mass splitting pattern in the differential elliptic flow data observed at RHIC. To demonstrate this, we predict the elliptic flow parameter for phi mesons to directly observe the flow just after hadronisation. We also discuss recent applications of outputs from hydrodynamic calculations to J/psi suppression, thermal photon radiation and heavy quark diffusion.