Universal geometrical scaling of the elliptic flow

¹ Departamento de Física de Partículas and IGFAE, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
² CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal

^a e-mail: pajares@fpaxp1.usc.es

Published online: 24 March 2015

Abstract

The presence of scaling variables in experimental observables provide very valuable indications of the dynamics underlying a given physical process. In the last years, the search for geometric scaling, that is the presence of a scaling variable which encodes all geometrical information of the collision as well as other external quantities as the total energy, has been very active. This is motivated, in part, for being one of the genuine predictions of the Color Glass Condensate formalism for saturation of partonic densities. Here we extend these previous findings to the case of experimental data on elliptic flow. We find an excellent scaling for all centralities and energies, from RHIC to LHC, with a simple generalization of the scaling previously found for other observables and systems. Interestingly, the case of the photons, difficult to reconcile in most formalisms, nicely fit the scaling curve. We discuss on the possible interpretations of this finding in terms of initial or final state effects.