Latest flow results from PHENIX at RHIC - Quarks and Nuclear Physics Conference Proceedings

TL;DR

This paper presents recent flow measurements from PHENIX at RHIC, revealing rapid thermalization and quark-level collective behavior in hot nuclear matter, with insights from higher order harmonic flow analyses.

Contribution

It reports new flow results including higher order harmonics, enhancing understanding of initial geometry fluctuations and quark-level thermalization in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

v_2 indicates rapid thermalization and hydrodynamic behavior

Quark scaling of v_2 suggests quark-level thermalization

Higher order harmonics provide insights into initial geometry fluctuations

Abstract

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), key insights into the bulk properties of the hot and dense partonic matter arise from the study of azimuthal anisotropy (v_2) of the produced particles. The v_2 values indicate that the matter undergoes rapid thermalization and behaves hydrodynamically at low p_T. Furthermore, the quark scaling of v_2 for different particle species suggests that thermalization occurs at the quark level and that v_2 is the same for all quark flavors. Recently, higher order harmonic measurements (v_3, v_4) have shown the potential for insights into the medium's initial geometry and fluctuations. This proceeding discusses some of the PHENIX Collaboration's latest flow results and their implications.