Collective dynamics in heavy and light-ion collisions -- II) Determining the origin of collective behavior in high-energy collisions

Abstract

Exploiting the first measurements of the same ion species in OO collisons at RHIC and LHC, we propose an observable to distinguish whether collective behavior builds up through a hydrodynamic expansion of a strongly interacting QGP or few final state re-scatterings. Our procedure allows to disentangle the effects of the initial state geometry and the dynamical response mechanism on anisotropic flow. We validate its ability to discriminate between systems with different interaction rates using results from event-by-event simulations in kinetic theory.

Comments: 15 pages, 15 figures. v2: several minor changes, added data files in ancillary folder. v3: several minor changes, data files moved to cited zenodo archive, equivalent to published version