Speaker
Description
In relativistic heavy ion collisions the number of participant nucleons fluctuates event-by-event due to the fluctuations in the nucleon positions around the mean nuclear density profile. This asymmetry causes a shift in the center-of-mass rapidity of the participant zone and is known as longitudinal asymmetry. We have studied the effect of the longitudinal asymmetry on charged particle rapidity distributions and flow coefficients for Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions using the AMPT model at beam energies 200 and 62.4 AGeV and at different centrality bins. We see that the width of the rapidity shift distribution increases from central to peripheral collisions. The effect of longitudinal asymmetry can be related to the average rapidity shift by a third-order polynomial. The coefficients of this polynomial characterize the effect of the asymmetry and are proportional to the rapidity shift. The system size and energy dependence of the coefficients show that the longitudinal asymmetry is higher for smaller systems and also for lower collision energies. We show that the rapidity shift is quite significant for these systems and thus the inclusion of it is important for a precise estimation of the particle reproduction and anisotropic flow parameters from these collisions.
