Partonic effects on higher-order anisotropic flows in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

الأصل · EN

Higher-order anisotropic flows v₄ and v₆ in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are studied in a multiphase transport model that has previously been used successfully for describing the elliptic flow v₂ in these collisions. We find that the same parton scattering cross section of about 10 mb used in explaining the measured v₂ can also reproduce the recent data on v₄ and v₆ from Au + Au collisions at √s=200 AGeV. It is further found that the % v₄ is a more sensitive probe of the initial partonic dynamics in these collisions than v₂. Moreover, higher-order parton anisotropic flows are nonnegligible and satisfy the scaling relation vₙ,q(pₜ) v₂,qⁿ/²(pₜ), which leads naturally to the observed similar scaling relation among hadron anisotropic flows when the coalescence model is used to describe hadron production from the partonic matter.