Anisotropic hydrodynamic modeling of 200 GeV Au-Au collisions

TL;DR

This paper applies 3+1d quasiparticle anisotropic hydrodynamics to 200 GeV Au-Au collisions at RHIC, achieving good agreement with experimental data on particle spectra, multiplicities, and flow using a comprehensive viscous model.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed anisotropic hydrodynamic model including shear and bulk viscosities, and compares its predictions with experimental RHIC data for the first time.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental particle spectra and flow data

Model successfully describes multiplicities across particle species

Viscous hydrodynamics with specific parameters reproduces key observables.

Abstract

We compare phenomenological results from 3+1d quasiparticle anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydroQP) with experimental data collected in RHIC 200 GeV Au-Au collisions. We present comparisons of identified particle spectra in different centrality clases, charged particle multiplicity versus pseudorapidity, identified particle multiplicity versus centrality across a wide range of particle species, identified particle elliptic flow versus transverse momentum, and charged particle elliptic flow as a function of transverse momentum and rapidity. We use the same aHydroQP and hadronic production/feed down codes that were used previously to describe LHC 2.76 TeV data. The aHydroQP hydrodynamic model includes the effects of both shear and bulk viscosities in addition to an infinite number of transport coefficients computed self-consistently in the relaxation time approximation. To convert to the final state hadrons, we use anisotropic Cooper-Frye freeze-out performed on a fixed-energy-density hypersurface and compute the production/feed down using a customized version of Therminator 2. We find good agreement with many heavy-ion collision observables using only smooth Glauber initial conditions parameterized by an initial central temperature of T_0 = 455 MeV, a constant shear viscosity to entropy density ratio eta/s= 0.179, and a switching (freeze-out) temperature of T_FO=130 MeV.