Charm quarks are more hydrodynamic than light quarks in final-state elliptic flow

TL;DR

This study reveals that charm quarks exhibit a stronger hydrodynamic flow component in their elliptic flow compared to light quarks, making them better probes for the quark-gluon plasma's hydrodynamic behavior.

Contribution

It demonstrates that charm quarks have a larger hydrodynamic contribution to their elliptic flow than light quarks, contrary to naive expectations, due to their smaller deflection angles per collision.

Findings

Charm quark $v_{2}$ is more influenced by hydrodynamics than light quarks.

Heavier charm quarks require more scatterings to develop significant $v_{2}$.

Charm $v_{2}$ is a better probe for quark-gluon plasma properties.

Abstract

We study the charm quark elliptic flow ($v_{2}$) in heavy ion as well as small system collisions by tracking the evolution history of quarks of different flavors within a multi-phase transport model. The charm quark $v_{2}$ is studied as a function of the number of collisions the charm quark suffers with other quarks and then compared to the $v_{2}$ of lighter quarks. We find that the common escape mechanism is at work for both the charm and light quark $v_{2}$. However, contrary to the naive expectation, the hydrodynamics-type flow is found to contribute more to the final state charm $v_{2}$ than light quark $v_{2}$. This could be explained by the smaller average deflection angle the heavier charm quark undergoes in each collision, so that heavy quarks need more scatterings to accumulate a significant $v_{2}$, while lighter quarks can more easily change directions with scatterings with their $v_{2}$ coming more from the escape mechanism. Our finding thus suggests that the charm $v_{2}$ is a better probe for studying the hydrodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma.