• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevC.91.034902
• Corpus ID: 118791044

Effects of viscosity on the mapping of initial to final state in heavy ion collisions

@article{Gardim2015EffectsOV,
  title={Effects of viscosity on the mapping of initial to final state in heavy ion collisions},
  author={Fernando G. Gardim and Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler and M. Luzum and Fr'ed'erique Grassi},
  journal={Physical Review C},
  year={2015},
  volume={91},
  pages={034902}
}

• F. Gardim, J. Noronha-Hostler, +1 author F. Grassi
• Published 10 November 2014
• Physics
• Physical Review C

We investigate the correlation between various aspects of the initial geometry of heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider energies and the final anisotropic flow, using v-USPhydro, a 2+1 event-by-event viscous relativistic hydrodynamical model. We test the extent of which shear and bulk viscosity affect the prediction of the final flow harmonics, $v_n$, from the initial eccentricities, $\varepsilon_n$. We investigate in detail the flow harmonics $v_1$ through $v_5$ where we find that $v_1$, $v_4$, and $v_5$ are dependent on more complicated aspects of the initial geometry that are especially important for the description of peripheral collisions, including a non-linear dependence on eccentricities as well as a dependence on shorter-scale features of the initial density. Furthermore, we compare our results to previous results from NeXSPheRIO, a 3+1 relativistic ideal hydrodynamical model that has a non-zero initial flow contribution, and find that the combined contribution from 3+1 dynamics and non-zero, fluctuating initial flow decreases the predictive ability of the initial eccentricities, in particular for very peripheral collisions, but also disproportionately in central collisions.