Jet quenching effects on the anisotropic flow at RHIC

TL;DR

This paper studies how energy loss from dijets in quark-gluon plasma affects the anisotropic flow in heavy ion collisions at RHIC, revealing significant flow enhancement when jets deposit substantial energy into the medium.

Contribution

It introduces a model coupling jet energy loss to hydrodynamics via a source term, analyzing its impact on flow anisotropy in heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Anisotropic flow increases notably with jet energy deposition above 12 GeV.

Jet energy suppression correlates with increased flow anisotropy.

Significant flow enhancement occurs when jets deposit more than 6 GeV each.

Abstract

In this article we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma may perturb the geometry-induced hydrodynamic expansion of the bulk nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. The coupling between the jets and the medium is done through a source term in the energy-momentum conservation equations for ideal hydrodynamics. We concentrate our attention at mid-rapidity and solve the equations event-by-event imposing boost-invariance. For $p_T \gtrsim 1$ GeV the anisotropic flow is found to be considerably enhanced, if the dijets deposit on average more than 12 GeV in the medium (or equivalently 6 GeV for each jet of the pair), which corresponds, in our model, to an average suppression greater than $65\%$ of the initial jet transverse energy.