Investigating the Role of Electric Fields on Flow Harmonics in Heavy-Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electric fields influence flow harmonics in heavy-ion collisions, revealing significant effects on pion and proton flow patterns and their mass-dependent behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a first-order correction to the blast-wave model to account for electric field effects on flow harmonics in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Electric fields cause noticeable corrections to flow harmonics.

Mass dependency observed in electric field-induced flow.

Splitting of particle and antiparticle elliptic flow discussed.

Abstract

Using the blast-wave model, we explore the effect of electric fields on spectra and flow harmonics (especially the elliptic flow) for charged pions and protons. We incorporate the first-order correction to the single-particle distribution function due to the electric fields and the dissipative effect while calculating the invariant yields of hadron in the Cooper-Frey prescription at the freezeout hypersurface. We find a noticeable correction to the directed and elliptic flow of pions and protons for unidirectional and azimuthal asymmetric electric fields in the transverse plane of magnitude $\sim m_{\pi}^{2}$. Further, we observe mass dependency of the directed flow generated due to the electric fields. The splitting of particle and antiparticle's elliptic flow is also discussed.