On the Role of Initial Conditions and Final State Interactions in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

We investigate the rapidity dependence of the elliptical flow in heavy ion collisions at 200 GeV (cms), by employing a three-dimensional hydrodynamic evolution, based on different initial conditions, and different freeze-out scenarios. It will be shown that the form of pseudo-rapidity ($\eta$) dependence of the elliptical flow is almost identical to space-time-rapidity (${\eta }_s$) dependence of the initial energy distribution, independent of the freeze-out prescriptions.