Azimuthal momentum isotropization in the Quark-Gluon Plasma thermalization

by Bin Wu (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (ES))

Thursday Aug 27, 2026, 1:30 PM → 3:30 PM Europe/Zurich

40/S2-D01 - Salle Dirac (CERN)

Azimuthal anisotropies coming from the initial state of a heavy-ion collision have been historically disregarded in the study of thermalization because they are expected to be rapidly washed out due to final-state interactions. However, they may be important when one attempts to describe azimuthal correlations observed in the collisions of small systems. In this talk, I shall discuss our recent studies on how these initial anisotropies relax in the context of the Boltzmann Equation in Diffusion Approximation (BEDA). We find a clear hierarchy in the relaxation time of the anisotropies in terms of each harmonic coefficient. We also explore the evolution of the $p_T$-dependent harmonic coefficients in time, finding a shift in the initial peak towards higher momenta that mimics the experimental data when we perform a phenomenologically motivated simulation.