No Arabic abstract
Fluid dynamical models preceded the first heavy ion accelerator experiments, and led to the main trend of this research since then. In recent years fluid dynamical processes became a dominant direction of research in high energy heavy ion reactions. The Quark-gluon Plasma formed in these reactions has low viscosity, which leads to significant fluctuations and turbulent instabilities. One has to study and separate these two effects, but this is not done yet in a systematic way. Here we present a few selected points of the early developments, the most interesting collective flow instabilities, their origins, their possible ways of detection and separation form random fluctuations arising from different origins, among these the most studied is the randomness of the initial configuration in the transverse plane.
In this paper, we implement Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to study the single particle distributions generated from thousands of {tt VISH2+1} hydrodynamic simulations with an aim to explore if a machine could directly discover flow from the huge amount of data without explicit instructions from human-beings. We found that the obtained PCA eigenvectors are similar to but not identical with the traditional Fourier bases. Correspondingly, the PCA defined flow harmonics $v_n^prime$ are also similar to the traditional $v_n$ for $n=2$ and 3, but largely deviated from the Fourier ones for $ngeq 4$. A further study on the symmetric cumulants and the Pearson coefficients indicates that mode-coupling effects are reduced for these flow harmonics defined by PCA.
Possible correlations of the global polarization of $Lambda$ hyperons with the angular momentum and transverse flow in the central region of colliding nuclei are studied based on refined estimate of the global polarization. Simulations of Au+Au collisions at collision energies $sqrt{s_{NN}}=$ 6-40 GeV are performed within the model of the three-fluid dynamics. Within the crossover and first-order-phase-transition scenarios this refined estimate quite satisfactorily reproduces the experimental STAR data. Hadronic scenario fails at high collision energies, $sqrt{s_{NN}}>$ 10 GeV, and even predicts opposite sign of the global polarization. It is found that the global polarization correlates with neither the angular momentum accumulated in the central region nor with directed and elliptic flow. At the same time we observed correlation between the angular momentum and directed flow in both their time and collision-energy dependence. These results suggest that, although initially the angular momentum is the driving force for the vortex generation, later the angular momentum and vortex motion become decorrelated in the midrapidity region. Then the midrapidity angular momentum is determined by the pattern of the directed flow and even becomes negative when the antiflow occurs. At the freeze-out stage, the dominant part of the participant angular momentum is accumulated in the fragmentation regions.
The collective harmonic flow in heavy-ion collisions correlates particles at all transverse momenta to be emitted preferably some directions. The factorization breaking coefficient measures the small decorrelation of the flow harmonics at two different transverse momenta. Using the hydrodynamic model I study in details the decorrelation of the harmonic flow due to the flow angle and the flow magnitude decorrelation at two transverse momenta. The effect can be seen in experiment measuring factorization breaking coefficients for the square of the harmonic flow vector at two transverse momenta. The hydrodynamic model predicts that the decorrelation of the flow magnitudes is about one half of the decorrelation of the overall flow (combining flow angle and flow magnitude decorrelations). These results are consistent with the principal component analysis of correlators of flow vectors squared.
Recently the splitting of elliptic flow $v_2$ at finite rapidities has been proposed as a result of the global vorticity in non-central relativistic heavy ion collisions. Using a multi-phase transport model that automatically includes the vorticity field and flow fluctuations, we confirm the left-right (i.e., on opposite sides of the impact parameter axis) splitting of the elliptic flow at finite rapidities. However, we find that this $v_2$ splitting is a result of the non-zero directed flow $v_1$ at finite rapidities, with the splitting magnitude $approx 8v_1/3pi$. As a result, the $v_2$ splitting vanishes at zero transverse momentum ($p_{rm T}$), and its magnitude and sign may have non-trivial dependences on $p_{rm T}$, centrality, collision energy, and hadron species. Since the left-right $v_2$ splitting is a combined effect of $v_1$ and $v_2$, it will benefit studies of the three-dimensional structure and dynamics of the dense matter.
A systematic analysis of correlations between different orders of $p_T$-differential flow is presented, including mode coupling effects in flow vectors, correlations between flow angles (a.k.a. event-plane correlations), and correlations between flow magnitudes, all of which were previously studied with integrated flows. We find that the mode coupling effects among differential flows largely mirror those among the corresponding integrated flows, except at small transverse momenta where mode coupling contributions are small. For the fourth- and fifth-order flow vectors $V_4$ and $V_5$ we argue that the event plane correlations can be understood as the ratio between the mode coupling contributions to these flows and and the flow magnitudes. We also find that for $V_4$ and $V_5$ the linear response contribution scales linearly with the corresponding cumulant-defined eccentricities but not with the standard eccentricities.