No Arabic abstract
The azimuthal anisotropic flow of identified and unidentified charged particles has been systematically studied in Cu+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV for harmonics $n=$ 1-4 in the pseudorapidity range $|eta|<1$. The directed flow in Cu+Au collisions is compared with the rapidity-odd and, for the first time, the rapidity-even components of charged particle directed flow in Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200~GeV. The slope of the directed flow pseudorapidity dependence in Cu+Au collisions is found to be similar to that in Au+Au collisions, with the intercept shifted toward positive $eta$ values, i.e., the Cu-going direction. The mean transverse momentum projected onto the spectator plane, $langle p_xrangle$, in Cu+Au collision also exhibits approximately linear dependence on $eta$ with the intercept at about $etaapprox-0.4$, closer to the rapidity of the Cu+Au system center-of-mass. The observed dependencies find natural explanation in a picture of the directed flow originating partly due the tilted source and partly due to the rapidity dependent asymmetry in the initial density distribution. Charge-dependence of the $langle p_xrangle$ was also observed in Cu+Au collisions, indicating an effect of the initial electric field created by charge difference of the spectator protons in two colliding nuclei. The rapidity-even component of directed flow in Au+Au collisions is close to that in Pb+Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV, indicating a similar magnitude of dipole-like fluctuations in the initial-state density distribution. Higher harmonic flow in Cu+Au collisions exhibits similar trends to those observed in Au+Au and Pb+Pb collisions and is qualitatively reproduced by a viscous hydrodynamic model and a multi-phase transport model. For all harmonics with $nge2$ we observe an approximate scaling of $v_n$ with the number of constituent quarks.
We have studied the dependence of azimuthal anisotropy $v_2$ for inclusive and identified charged hadrons in Au$+$Au and Cu$+$Cu collisions on collision energy, species, and centrality. The values of $v_2$ as a function of transverse momentum $p_T$ and centrality in Au$+$Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$=200 GeV and 62.4 GeV are the same within uncertainties. However, in Cu$+$Cu collisions we observe a decrease in $v_2$ values as the collision energy is reduced from 200 to 62.4 GeV. The decrease is larger in the more peripheral collisions. By examining both Au$+$Au and Cu$+$Cu collisions we find that $v_2$ depends both on eccentricity and the number of participants, $N_{rm part}$. We observe that $v_2$ divided by eccentricity ($varepsilon$) monotonically increases with $N_{rm part}$ and scales as ${N_{rm part}^{1/3}}$. The Cu$+$Cu data at 62.4 GeV falls below the other scaled $v_{2}$ data. For identified hadrons, $v_2$ divided by the number of constituent quarks $n_q$ is independent of hadron species as a function of transverse kinetic energy $KE_T=m_T-m$ between $0.1<KE_T/n_q<1$ GeV. Combining all of the above scaling and normalizations, we observe a near-universal scaling, with the exception of the Cu$+$Cu data at 62.4 GeV, of $v_2/(n_qcdotvarepsiloncdot N^{1/3}_{rm part})$ vs $KE_T/n_q$ for all measured particles.
We report new STAR measurements of mid-rapidity yields for the $Lambda$, $bar{Lambda}$, $K^{0}_{S}$, $Xi^{-}$, $bar{Xi}^{+}$, $Omega^{-}$, $bar{Omega}^{+}$ particles in Cu+Cu collisions at sNN{200}, and mid-rapidity yields for the $Lambda$, $bar{Lambda}$, $K^{0}_{S}$ particles in Au+Au at sNN{200}. We show that at a given number of participating nucleons, the production of strange hadrons is higher in Cu+Cu collisions than in Au+Au collisions at the same center-of-mass energy. We find that aspects of the enhancement factors for all particles can be described by a parameterization based on the fraction of participants that undergo multiple collisions.
The PHENIX collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reports measurements of azimuthal dihadron correlations near midrapidity in $d$$+$Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$=200 GeV. These measurements complement recent analyses by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) involving central $p$$+$Pb collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$=5.02 TeV, which have indicated strong anisotropic long-range correlations in angular distributions of hadron pairs. The origin of these anisotropies is currently unknown. Various competing explanations include parton saturation and hydrodynamic flow. We observe qualitatively similar, but larger, anisotropies in $d$$+$Au collisions compared to those seen in $p$$+$Pb collisions at the LHC. The larger extracted $v_2$ values in $d$$+$Au collisions at RHIC are consistent with expectations from hydrodynamic calculations owing to the larger expected initial-state eccentricity compared with that from $p$$+$Pb collisions. When both are divided by an estimate of the initial-state eccentricity the scaled anisotropies follow a common trend with multiplicity that may extend to heavy ion data at RHIC and the LHC, where the anisotropies are widely thought to arise from hydrodynamic flow.
Due to the large masses, heavy-flavor quarks are dominantly produced in initial hard scattering processes and experience the whole evolution of the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC energies. They are also expected to thermalize slower than light-flavor quarks. Thus the measurement of heavy quark production and azimuthal anisotropy can provide important insights into the medium properties through their interactions with the medium. In these proceedings, we report measurements of $D^0$ production and elliptic flow ($v_2$) via topological reconstruction using STARs recently installed Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT). The new measurement of the nuclear modification factor ($R_{AA}$) of $D^0$ mesons in central Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV confirms the strong suppression at high transverse momenta ($p_{T}$) reported in the previous publication with much improved precision. We also report the measurement of elliptic flow for $D^0$ mesons in a wide transverse momentum range in 0-80% minimum-bias Au+Au collisions. The $D^0$ elliptic flow is finite for $p_{T}$ $>$ 2 GeV/c and is systematically below that of light hadrons in the same centrality interval. Furthermore, several theoretical calculations are compared to both $R_{AA}$ and $v_2$ measurements, and the charm quark diffusion coefficient is inferred to be between 2 and $sim$12.
We present the first measurement of charge-dependent directed flow in Cu+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ = 200 GeV. The results are presented as a function of the particle transverse momentum and pseudorapidity for different centralities. A finite difference between the directed flow of positive and negative charged particles is observed that qualitatively agrees with the expectations from the effects of the initial strong electric field between two colliding ions with different nuclear charges. The measured difference in directed flow is much smaller than that obtained from the parton-hadron-string-dynamics (PHSD) model, which suggests that most of the electric charges, i.e. quarks and antiquarks, have not yet been created during the lifetime of the strong electric field, which is of the order of, or less than, 1fm/$c$.