Speaker
Ms
P S Saumia
(Institute of Physics)
Description
We study the interesting similarities between the physics of cosmic microwave background radiation
anisotropies and the flow anisotropies in relativistic heavy ion collision experiments. Further we
explore how the techniques in CMBR analysis could be utilized in studying the flow anisotropies in
RHICE.
We argue that the initial state fluctuations of the matter formed in heavy ion collisions have
similar properties as the fluctuations in the early universe generated by the inflaton field, and by
studying the flow coeffecients ( a plot of v_n vs. n) we can obtain valuable information about the
nature and evolution of these fluctuations. We also study the effect of magnetic field on flow.
In the presence of magnetic field plasma develops three acoustic modes. It is known in literature that
this distorts the CMB acoustic peaks. We show that flow coefficients in relativistic heavy ion collisions
can be significantly affected by these effects where a a strong magnetic field is known to be
present in the initial stages (of non-central collisions) and is expected to survive due to strong
induced fields in the conducting plasma. This raises the possibility whether a larger value of $\eta/s$
can be accommodated by RHIC data. We also show that flow anisotropies in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
can be analyzed using a certain technique of shape analysis of excursion sets recently proposed by us for
CMBR fluctuations to investigate anisotropic expansion history of the universe. The technique analyzes shapes
(sizes) of patches above (below) certain threshold value for transverse energy/particle number fluctuations
(the excursion sets) as a function of the azimuthal angle and rapidity. This provides an alternative way to
identify the event plane in an event.
Primary author
Ms
P S Saumia
(Institute of Physics)
Co-authors
Prof.
A. M. Srivastava
(Institute of Physics)
Ms
R. K. Mohapatra
(Institute of Physics)
