Hydrodynamic modeling of deconfinement phase transition in nuclear collisions

TL;DR

This paper uses hydrodynamic simulations to study how the deconfinement phase transition affects observables like elliptic flow and proton rapidity distributions in gold nucleus collisions at various energies.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed hydrodynamic model comparing scenarios with and without the deconfinement phase transition in nuclear collisions.

Findings

Deconfinement transition increases elliptic flow.

It causes flattening of proton rapidity distributions.

The model reproduces key experimental observables.

Abstract

The (3+1)-dimensional ideal hydrodynamics is used to simulate collisions of gold nuclei with bombarding energies from 1 to 160 GeV per nucleon. The initial state is represented by two cold Lorentz-boosted nuclei. Two equations of state: with and without the deconfinement phase transition are used. We have investigated dynamical trajectories of compressed baryon-rich matter as functions of various thermodynamical variables. The parameters of collective flow and hadronic spectra are calculated. It is shown that presence of the deconfinement phase transition leads to increase of the elliptic flow and to flattening of proton rapidity distributions.