Investigating the scaling of higher-order flows in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the scaling behaviors of higher-order flow coefficients in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, revealing that certain observed scalings are influenced by hadronic interactions and partonic dynamics, with implications for understanding quark coalescence.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the modified NCQ scaling cannot be explained by naive coalescence alone and highlights the role of hadronic afterburner and thermal freeze-out in flow scaling.

Findings

Modified NCQ scaling is not reproduced by naive coalescence.

The $v_{n}/v_{2}^{n/2}$ ratio is sensitive to partonic interactions.

Differences between mesons and baryons are observed but expected to be similar experimentally.

Abstract

The modified number of constituent quark (NCQ) scaling $v_{n}/n_{q}^{n/2} \sim KE_{T}/n_{q}$ for mesons and baryons and the scaling relation $v_{n} \sim v_{2}^{n/2}$ for higher-order anisotropic flows, which were observed experimentally, have been investigated at top RHIC energy. It has been found that the modified NCQ scaling can not be obtained from the naive coalescence even by taking into account event-by-event fluctuations but may be due to hadronic afterburner or thermal freeze-out. In addition, we observed that the behavior of the $v_{n}/v_{2}^{n/2}$ ratio is sensitive to the partonic interaction, and it is different for mesons and baryons from the naive coalescence but is expected to be almost the same experimentally.