Heavy quark flow as better probes of QGP properties

¹ Key Laboratory of Quarks and Lepton Physics (MOE) and Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
² Department of Physics, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina 27858, USA
³ College of Science, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430065, China
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
⁵ School of Science, Huzhou University, Huzhou, Zhejiang 313000, China

^* e-mail: linz@ecu.edu
^** e-mail: lihl@wust.edu.cn
^*** e-mail: fqwang@purdue.edu

Published online: 2 February 2018

Abstract

In earlier studies we have proposed that most parton v₂ comes from the anisotropic escape of partons, not from the hydrodynamic flow, even for semi-central Au+Au collisions at = 200 GeV. Here we study the flavor dependence of this escape mechanism with a multi-phase transport model. In contrast to naive expectations, we find that the charm v₂ is much more sensitive to the hydrodynamic flow than the lighter quark v₂, and the fraction of v₂ from the escape mechanism decreases strongly with the quark mass for large collision systems. We also find that the light quark collective flow is essential for the charm quark v₂. Our finding thus suggests that heavy quark flows are better probes of the quark-gluon-plasma properties than light quark flows.