Elliptic and triangular flow of heavy flavor in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper studies the elliptic and triangular flow of heavy mesons in heavy-ion collisions, showing how heavy quark dynamics relate to the evolving quark-gluon plasma and predicting nonzero triangular flow due to initial fluctuations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of heavy meson flow coefficients, including predictions for triangular flow from event-by-event fluctuations, and compares different interaction models.

Findings

Elliptic flow of D mesons matches experimental data at LHC.

Triangular flow of D mesons is predicted to be nonzero due to initial fluctuations.

Higher-order flow coefficients help assess thermalization of heavy quarks.

Abstract

We investigate the elliptic and the triangular flow of heavy mesons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC. The dynamics of heavy quarks is coupled to the locally thermalized and fluid dynamically evolving quark-gluon plasma. The elliptic flow of $D$ mesons and the centrality dependence measured at the LHC is well reproduced for purely collisional and bremsstrahlung interactions. Due to the event-by-event fluctuating initial conditions from the EPOS2 model, the $D$ meson triangular flow is predicted to be nonzero at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV and $\sqrt{s}=2.76$ TeV. We study the centrality dependence and quantify the contributions stemming from flow of the light bulk event and the hadronization process. The flow coefficients as response to the initial eccentricities behave differently for heavy mesons than for light hadrons due to their inertia. Higher-order flow coefficients of heavy flavor become important in order to quantify the degree of thermalization.