Measurements of directed, elliptic, and triangular flow of charged hadrons from Cu+Au collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 200 GeV with PHENIX at RHIC

Abstract

Measurements of anisotropic flow of inclusive charged hadrons and identified +-p, +-K, p and ¯ p produced at midrapidity in asymmetric Cu+Au collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 200 GeV are presented. The data were collected by the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 2012. The first three Fourier coefficients in the particles’ azimuthal distributions, v1, v2, and v3 characterizing directed, elliptic, and triangular flow are studied over a broad range of transverse momentum and collision centrality. System comparisons are made with Cu+Cu and Au+Au collisions at the same center-of-mass energy and varying scaling parameters are used to investigate the effects of the initial geometry. The slopes of the measured vn distributions are ordered by particle mass as expected in a system with global flow. The results are well described by viscous hydrodynamics calculations with shear viscosity over entropy density values close to the quantum minimum.