Flavor ordering of elliptic flows at high transverse momentum

Abstract

Based on the quark coalescence model for the parton-to-hadron phase transition in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, we relate the elliptic flow ($v_2$) of high $\text{pt}$ hadrons to that of high $\text{pt}$ quarks. For high $\text{pt}$ hadrons produced from an isospin symmetric and quark-antiquark symmetric partonic matter, magnitudes of their elliptic flows follow a flavor ordering as $(v_{2,\pi }=v_{2,N})>(v_{2,\Lambda }=v_{2,\Sigma })>v_{2,K}>v_{2,\Xi }>(v_{2,\varphi }=v_{2,\Omega })$ if strange quarks have a smaller elliptic flow than light quarks. The elliptic flows of high $\text{pt}$ hadrons further follow a simple quark counting rule if strange quarks and light quarks have same high $\text{pt}$ spectrum and coalescence probability.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, revtex