We study the multiplicity and rapidity dependence of thermal and prompt photon production in p+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, using a (3+1)D viscous hydrodynamic framework. Direct photon anisotropic flow coefficients $v^gamma_{2,3}$ and nuclear modification factor $R^gamma_mathrm{pPb}(p_T)$ are presented in both the p-going (backward) and the Pb-going (forward) directions. The interplay between initial state cold nuclear effect and final state thermal enhancement at different rapidity regions is discussed. The proposed rapidity dependent thermal photon enhancement and direct photon anisotropic flow observables can elucidate non-trivial longitudinal dynamics of hot quark-gluon plasma droplets created in small collision systems.
We study the evolution of the quark-gluon composition of the plasma created in ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (uRHICs) employing a partonic transport theory that includes both elastic and inelastic collisions plus a mean fields dynamics associated to the widely used quasi-particle model. The latter, able to describe lattice QCD thermodynamics, implies a chemical equilibrium ratio between quarks and gluons strongly increasing as $Trightarrow T_c$, the phase transition temperature. Accordingly we see in realistic simulations of uRHICs a rapid evolution from a gluon dominated initial state to a quark dominated plasma close to $T_c$. The quark to gluon ratio can be modified by about a factor of $sim 20$ in the bulk of the system and appears to be large also in the high $p_T$ region. We discuss how this aspect, often overflown, can be important for a quantitative study of several key issues in the QGP physics: shear viscosity, jet quenching, quarkonia suppression. Furthermore a bulk plasma made by more than $80%$ of quarks plus antiquarks provides a theoretical basis for hadronization via quark coalescence.
Several transport models have been employed in recent years to analyze heavy-flavor meson spectra in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Heavy-quark transport coefficients extracted from these models with their default parameters vary, however, by up to a factor of 5 at high momenta. To investigate the origin of this large theoretical uncertainty, a systematic comparison of heavy-quark transport coefficients is carried out between various transport models. Within a common scheme devised for the nuclear modification factor of charm quarks in a brick medium of a quark-gluon plasma, the systematic uncertainty of the extracted drag coefficient among these models is shown to be reduced to a factor of 2, which can be viewed as the smallest intrinsic systematical error band achievable at present time. This indicates the importance of a realistic hydrodynamic evolution constrained by bulk hadron spectra and of heavy-quark hadronization for understanding the final heavy-flavor hadron spectra and extracting heavy-quark drag coefficient. The transverse transport coefficient is less constrained due to the influence of the underlying mechanism for heavy-quark medium interaction. Additional constraints on transport models such as energy loss fluctuation and transverse-momentum broadening can further reduce theoretical uncertainties in the extracted transport coefficients.
In this paper we study the real-time evolution of heavy quarkonium in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on the basis of the open quantum systems approach. In particular, we shed light on how quantum dissipation affects the dynamics of the relative motion of the quarkonium state over time. To this end we present a novel non-equilibrium master equation for the relative motion of quarkonium in a medium, starting from Lindblad operators derived systematically from quantum field theory. In order to implement the corresponding dynamics, we deploy the well established quantum state diffusion method. In turn we reveal how the full quantum evolution can be cast in the form of a stochastic non-linear Schrodinger equation. This for the first time provides a direct link from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to phenomenological models based on non-linear Schrodinger equations. Proof of principle simulations in one-dimension show that dissipative effects indeed allow the relative motion of the constituent quarks in a quarkonium at rest to thermalize. Dissipation turns out to be relevant already at early times well within the QGP lifetime in relativistic heavy ion collisions.
We investigate the hadron production from the vortical quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions. Based on the quark-coalescence and statistical hadronization models, we show that total hadron yields summed over the spin components are enhanced by the local vorticity with quadratic dependence. The enhancement factor amounts to be a few percent and may be detectable within current experimental sensitivities. We also show that the effect is stronger for hadrons with larger spin, and thus propose a new signature of the local vorticity, which may be detected by the yield ratio of distinct hadron species having different spins such as $phi$ and $eta$. The vorticity dependence of hadron yields seems robust, with consistent predictions in both of the hadron production mechanisms for reasonable values of the vorticity strength estimated for heavy-ion collisions.
We argue that an expanding quark-gluon plasma has an anomalous viscosity, which arises from interactions with dynamically generated colour fields. The anomalous viscosity dominates over the collisional viscosity for large velocity gradients or weak coupling. This effect may provide an explanation for the apparent near perfect liquidity of the matter produced in nuclear collisions at RHIC without the assumption that it is a strongly coupled state.