Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Hydrodynamic flows from RHIC to LHC

Chun Shen

Ohio State University

There will be two parts of my talk. In the first part, we will present an apple to apple comparisons between (2+1)-d with (3+1)-d viscous hydrodynamic simulations for relativistic heavy ion collisions. We explore quantitatively how good the longitudinal boost-invariance assumption is near midrapidity for both top RHIC and LHC energy. In the second part, we will present a systematic study on the evolution of hadron spectra and their azimuthal anisotropy from the lowest collision energy RHIC has measured, √s = 7.7AGeV, to the highest energy LHC will reach, √s = 5500AGeV. As the collision energy increases, we quantitatively study the increases of the charged particle multiplicity, initial temperature, and lifetime of the fireball. We also explain that the measured differential elliptic flow v2(p_T) for charged hadrons does not grow with collision energy as a consequence of the cancellation between contributions from light and heavy particles. Future comparisons with experimental data at low collision energies will further test the hydrodynamic model and shed additional light on the temperature dependence of the transport coefficients of QGP matter, especially the specific shear viscosity.