Dominance of Electric Fields in the Charge Splitting of Elliptic Flow

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that electric fields predominantly influence the charge splitting of elliptic flow in quark-gluon plasma, with their slower decay making them more impactful than magnetic fields, supported by thermal and electromagnetic modeling.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis showing electric fields' dominance in elliptic flow splitting, incorporating Maxwell's equations and thermal models to estimate field effects at specific collision energies.

Findings

Electric fields decay slower than magnetic fields in QGP.

Estimated field strength aligns with experimental data.

Electric fields can explain observed elliptic flow splitting.

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the impact of electromagnetic fields, highlighting the dominant effect of electric fields on the splitting of elliptic flow, \( \Delta v_2 \) with transverse momentum ($p_T$). The velocity and temperature profiles of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is described through thermal model calculations. The electromagnetic field evolution is however determined from the solutions of Maxwell's equations, assuming constant electric and chiral conductivities. We find that the slower decay of the electric fields compared to the magnetic fields makes its impact on the splitting of the elliptic flow more dominant. We further estimated that the maximum value of \( |\langle eF \rangle| \), evaluated by averaging the field values over all spatial points on the hypersurface and across all field components, is approximately \( (0.010003 \pm 0.000195) \, m_{\pi}^2 \) for \( \sqrt{s_{\text{NN}}} = 7.7 \, \text{GeV} \), which could describe the splitting of elliptic flow data within the current experimental uncertainty reasonably well.