Model study of the energy dependence of the correlation between anisotropic flow and the mean transverse momentum in Au+Au collisions

TL;DR

This study uses a hybrid model to analyze how the correlation between anisotropic flow and mean transverse momentum in Au+Au collisions depends on beam energy, revealing insights into the medium's viscosity and initial geometry effects.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive hybrid modeling approach to predict the energy and event-shape dependence of flow-momentum correlations in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Correlation coefficient is insensitive to beam energy.

Variance and covariance patterns are consistent with shear viscosity effects.

Initial geometry significantly influences the correlation.

Abstract

A hybrid model that employs the hadron-string transport model UrQMD and the (3+1)D relativistic viscous hydrodynamic code vHLLE, is used to investigate the beam energy dependence of the correlation coefficient $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ between the average transverse momentum $[p_{T}]$ of hadrons emitted in an event and the square of the anisotropic flow coefficient $v_2^2$. For Au+Au collisions, the model predicts characteristic patterns for the energy and event-shape dependence of the variances for $[p_{T}]$ and $v_n^2$ (${\rm Var}([p_T])$ and ${\rm Var}(v_2^2)$), and the covariance of $v_n^2$ and $[p_{T}]$ (${\rm cov}(v_{2}^{2},[p_T])$), consistent with the attenuation effects of the specific shear viscosity $\eta/s$. In contrast, $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ is predicted to be insensitive to the beam energy but sensitive to the initial-state geometry of the collisions. These observations suggest that a precise set of measurements for ${\rm Var}([p_T])$, ${\rm Var}(v_2^2)$, ${\rm cov}(v_{2}^{2},[p_T])$ and $\rho(v^{2}_{2},[p_{T}])$ as a function of beam-energy and event-shape, could aid precision extraction of the temperature and baryon chemical-potential dependence of $\eta/s$ from the wealth of Au+Au data obtained in the RHIC beam energy scan.