Kernphysikalisches Kolloquium
Location: Physics Building, Science Campus Riedberg, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, room 2.116
Time: Friday, November 09, 2012, 13:30-14:30 (plus 10min for discussion)
Contact: hees@fias.uni-frankfurt.de
Combined Yang-Mills and relativistic viscous fluid-dynamic simulation of event-by-event flow at RHIC and LHC
Björn Schenke (Brookhaven National Lab)
I present a new description of the initial stage of heavy-ion collisions, taking into account event-by-event geometric fluctuations in nucleon positions and intrinsic sub-nucleon scale color charge fluctuations.
Incoming nuclei are described by a combination of the impact parameter dependent saturation model (IP-Sat) and classical Yang-Mills dynamics. The evolution of the gluon fields generated in the collision
is also governed by the Yang-Mills equations. After a time of the order of the inverse saturation scale, the energy-momentum tensor of the system is computed. It provides the initial conditions for a relativistic
viscous fluid-dynamic simulation. This combined Yang-Mills and fluid-dynamic simulation describes well the anisotropic flow data measured at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). I will show that it also reproduces the event-by-event distributions of the flow coefficients v_2, v_3 and v_4 recently measured by the ATLAS collaboration. I will outline the implications of these findings for the better understanding of the initial structure and dynamics in heavy-ion collisions as well as for the extraction of transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma.