Longitudinal fluctuations and decorrelations of anisotropic flows in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This study investigates how anisotropic flow patterns in heavy-ion collisions vary along the longitudinal direction, revealing correlations with initial collision geometry and energy, using advanced hydrodynamic simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of longitudinal flow decorrelations in heavy-ion collisions using (3+1)D hydrodynamics with fluctuating initial conditions, highlighting their dependence on collision energy and geometry.

Findings

Longitudinal flow decorrelations are larger at lower energies and in less central collisions.

Strong correlations exist between initial state structures and final flow decorrelations.

Elliptic flow decorrelation shows a non-monotonic dependence on collision centrality.

Abstract

We study the longitudinal decorrelations of elliptic, triangular and quadrangular flows in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC energies. The event-by-event CLVisc (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamics model, combined with the fully fluctuating AMPT initial conditions, is utilized to simulate the space-time evolution of the strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma. Detailed analysis is performed for the longitudinal decorrelations of flow vectors, flow magnitudes and flow orientations. We find strong correlations between final-state longitudinal decorrelations of anisotropic flows and initial-state longitudinal structures and collision geometry: while the decorrelation of elliptic flow shows a non-monotonic centrality dependence due to initial elliptic geometry, typically the longitudinal flow decorrelations are larger in lower energy and less central collisions where the mean lengths of the string structure are shorter in the initial states.