Collectivity in ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan 48201, USA
² RIKEN BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA
³ Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA

^* e-mail: chunshen@wayne.edu

Published online: 1 March 2023

Abstract

We present full (3+1 )D dynamical simulations to study collective behavior in ultra-peripheral nucleus-nucleus collisions (UPC) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with the 3DGlauber+MUSIC+UrQMD framework [1, 2]. By extrapolating from asymmetric p+Pb collisions, we simulate a quasi-real photon γ* interacting with the Pb nucleus in an ultra-peripheral collision at the LHC, assuming strong final-state effects. We study the elliptic flow hierarchy between p+Pb and γ*+Pb collisions, which is dominated by the difference in longitudinal flow decorrelations. Our theoretical framework provides a quantitative tool to study collectivity in small asymmetric collision systems at current and future collider experiments.