arXiv subjects

Scott Pratt

Publications and source records attributed to Scott Pratt.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Consistent Implementation of Finite-Range Terms into Hydrodynamics

Non-zero-range interactions are often incorporated into mean field theories through gradient terms. Here, a formalism is developed to incorporate such terms into hydrodynamics. These terms alter expressions for the entropy, chemical potential, temperature and the stress-energy tensor. The formalism respects local conservation of energy, charge and entropy. The formalism leads to static solutions where the temperature, chemical potential and hydrodynamic acceleration all vanish, even when the density profile might be non-uniform. Profiles for a phase boundary and for correlation functions are calculated to illustrate the gradient modifications for various thermodynamic quantities. Also, for hydrodynamic calculations that add thermal noise to generate density-density correlations of the desired strength, an additional noise term is derived so that, at equilibrium, correlations are generated with both the correct size and length scale.

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arXiv2016

Relating Measurable Correlations in Heavy Ion Collisions to Bulk Properties of Equilibrated QCD Matter

In order to compare theoretical calculations of thermal fluctuations of conserved quantities, such as charge susceptibilities or the specific heat, to experimentally measured correlations and fluctuations in heavy ion collisions, one must confront the reality of changing conditions within the collision environment, and transport of conserved quantities within the finite duration of the expansion and dissolution of the reaction. In previous work, fluctuations of conserved charges from lattice calculations, where charge is allowed to fluctuate within the designated volume consistent with the grand canonical ensemble, was linked to correlations in heavy-ion collisions, which accounted for the finite time with which to transport absolutely conserved quanatities. In this case details of the correlations were related to the evolution of the susceptibility. In this work, this paradigm is extended to compare fluctuations of momentum or energy to transverse energy correlations that can be measured in heavy-ion collisions. The sensitivity of these correlations to the equation of state, viscosity and diffusion is illustrated by considering simple models without transverse expansion. Only correlations in relative spatial rapidity are discussed here, but the prospects for extending these ideas to realistic calculations and for making realistic connections with experiment are discussed.

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arXiv2016

Determining Transport Coefficients for a Microscopic Simulation of a Hadron Gas

Quark-Gluon plasmas produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions quickly expand and cool, entering a phase consisting of multiple interacting hadronic resonances just below the QCD deconfinement temperature, $T\sim 155$ MeV. Numerical microscopic simulations have emerged as the principal method for modeling the behavior of the hadronic stage of heavy-ion collisions, but the transport properties that characterize these simulations are not well understood. Methods are presented here for extracting the shear viscosity, and two transport parameters that emerge in Israel-Stewart hydrodynamics. The analysis is based on studying how the stress-energy tensor responds to velocity gradients. Results agree with expectations based on Kubo relations.

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arXiv2015

Electromagnetic recombination spectra at the quark-hadron phase transition

When quarks hadronize, they accelerate. Because they carry electric charge, they must radiate light as they accelerate and hadronize. This is true not only in jets but also in heavy ion collisions, where a thermalized plasma of quarks and gluons cools into a gas of hadrons. First, direct emission of photons from two quarks coalescing into pions is calculated using the quark-meson model. The yield of final-state photons to pions is found to be about $e^2/g^2_{πqq}$, which is on the order of a percent. Second, the yield of photons from the decay of highly excited color singlets, which may exist ephemerally during hadronizaton, is estimated. Because these contributions occur late in the reaction, they should carry significant elliptic flow, which may help explain the large observed flow of direct photons at RHIC by the PHENIX Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The enhanced emission also helps explain PHENIX's surprisingly large observed $γ/π$ ratio.

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arXiv2015

Towards a Deeper Understanding of How Experiments Constrain the Underlying Physics of Heavy-Ion Collisions

Recent work has provided the means to rigorously determine properties of super-hadronic matter from experimental data through the application of broad scale modeling of high-energy nuclear collisions within a Bayesian framework. These studies have provided unprecedented statistical inferences about the physics underlying nuclear collisions by virtue of simultaneously considering a wide range of model parameters and experimental observables. Notably, this approach has been used to constrain both the QCD equation of state and the shear viscosity above the quark-hadron transition. Although the inferences themselves have a clear meaning, the complex nature of the relationships between model parameters and observables have remained relatively obscure. We present here a novel extension of the standard Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach that allows for the quantitative determination of how inferences of model parameters are driven by experimental measurements and their uncertainties. This technique is then applied in the context of heavy ion collisions in order to explore previous results in greater depth. The resulting relationships are useful for identifying model weaknesses, prioritizing future experimental measurements, and most importantly: developing an intuition for the role that different observables play in constraining our understanding of the underlying physics.

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arXiv2015

Production of Charge in Heavy Ion Collisions

By analyzing preliminary experimental measurements of charge-balance functions from the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic-Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC), it is found that pictures where balancing charges are produced in a single surge, and therefore separated by a single length scale, are inconsistent with data. In contrast, a model that assumes two surges, one associated with the formation of a thermalized quark-gluon plasma and a second associated with hadronization, provides a far superior reproduction of the data. A statistical analysis of the model comparison finds that the two-surge model best reproduces the data if the charge production from the first surge is similar to expectations for equilibrated matter taken from lattice gauge theory. The charges created in the first surge appear to separate by approximately one unit of spatial rapidity before emission, while charges from the second wave appear to have separated by approximately a half unit or less.

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arXiv2015

Constraining the Eq. of State of Super-Hadronic Matter from Heavy-Ion Collisions

The equation of state of QCD matter for temperatures near and above the quark-hadron transition (165 MeV) is inferred within a Bayesian framework through the comparison of data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and from the Large Hadron Collider to theoretical models. State-of- the-art statistical techniques are applied to simultaneously analyze multiple classes of observables while varying 14 independent model parameters. The resulting posterior distribution over possible equations of state is consistent with results from lattice gauge theory.

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arXiv2014

Chemical properties of super-hadronic matter created in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Preliminary charge balance functions from the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are compared to a model where quarks are produced in two waves. If a chemically equilibrated quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is created the strength and diffusive spread of the first wave should be governed by the chemical composition of the QGP, while the second wave should be determined by the increased number of quarks required to make the observed final-state hadrons. A simple model parameterizes the chemistry of the super-hadronic matter and the two correlation lengths for the two waves. Calculations are compared to preliminary data from the STAR Collaboration. The chemistry of the super-hadronic matter appears to be within 20\% of expectations from lattice gauge theory.

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arXiv2014

Extracting the shear viscosity of a high temperature hadron gas

Quark-Gluon plasmas produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions quickly expand and cool, entering a phase consisting of multiple interacting hadronic resonances just below the QCD deconfinement temperature. The transport properties of this hot hadron gas are poorly understood, yet they play an important role in our ability to infer transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma, because experimental measurements integrate over the whole system evolution. Assuming that the hot hadron gas can be modeled by a hadron cascade code based on kinetic theory assuming binary interactions, the shear viscosity over entropy ratio of a hot hadron gas for temperatures in between 120 MeV and 170 MeV is extracted. Furthermore, we present estimates for a second order transport coefficient, the shear viscous relaxation time at a temperature of 165 MeV.

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arXiv2014

Baryon Annihilation and Regeneration in Heavy Ion Collisions

The role of baryon-antibaryon annihilation during the hadronic stage of a relativistic heavy ion collision is explored by simulating the chemical evolution of a hadron gas. Beginning with a chemically equilibrated gas at an initial temperature of 170 MeV, the chemical composition of a representative hydrodynamic cell is followed throughout the hadronic stage. The cell's volume changes with time according to a parameterization that mimics a three-dimensional hydrodynamic expansion. The chemical evolution includes both annihilation and regeneration of baryons, consistent with detailed balance. During the hadronic stage, the number of baryons drops by approximately $40\%$ for the case where there is no net baryonic charge. When the calculations are performed without the baryon regenerating processes, e.g. $5π\rightarrow p\bar{p}$, the loss of baryons was found to be closer to $50\%$. After accounting for annihilation, yields are consistent with measurements from the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC. Baryon annihilation is shown to alter the extracted chemical breakup temperature by significantly changing the $p/π$ ratio. Assuming that annihilation cross sections are independent of the strangeness and isospin of the annihilating baryon and anti-baryon, the loss of strange baryons from annihilation is found to be similar.

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arXiv2014

Determining Fundamental Properties of Matter Created in Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Posterior distributions for physical parameters describing relativistic heavy-ion collisions, such as the viscosity of the quark-gluon plasma, are extracted through a comparison of hydrodynamic-based transport models to experimental results from 100$A$ GeV + 100$A$ GeV Au+Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). By simultaneously varying six parameters and by evaluating several classes of observables, we are able to explore the complex intertwined dependencies of observables to model parameters. We obtain a full multi-dimensional posterior distribution for the model output given a large set of experimental observations, the methods developed here provide a range of acceptable values for each parameter, and reveal correlations between them. The breadth of observables and the number of parameters considered here go far beyond previous studies in this field. The statistical tools, which are based upon Gaussian Process emulators, are tested in detail and should be extendable to larger data sets and a higher number of parameters.

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arXiv2014

Accounting for backflow in hydrodynamic-simulation interfaces

Methods for building a consistent interface between hydrodynamic and simulation modules is presented. These methods account for the backflow across the hydrodynamic/simulation hyper-surface. The algorithms are efficient, relatively straight-forward to implement, and account for conservation laws across the hyper-surface. The methods also account for the spurious interactions between particles in the backflow and other particles by following the subsequent impact of such particles. Since the number of altered trajectories grows exponentially in time, a cutoff is built into the procedure so that the effects of the backflow are ignored beyond a certain number of collisions

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arXiv2013

A fully dynamical simulation of central nuclear collisions

We present a fully dynamical simulation of central nuclear collisions around mid-rapidity at LHC energies. Unlike previous treatments, we simulate all phases of the collision, including the equilibration of the system. For the simulation, we use numerical relativity solutions to AdS/CFT for the pre-equilibrium stage, viscous hydrodynamics for the plasma equilibrium stage and kinetic theory for the low density hadronic stage. Our pre-equilibrium stage provides initial conditions for hydrodynamics, resulting in sizable radial flow. The resulting light particle spectra reproduce the measurements from the ALICE experiment at all transverse momenta.

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arXiv2013

Viewing the Chemical Evolution of the Quark-Gluon Plasma with Charge Balance Functions

Correlations from charge conservation are affected by when charge/anticharge pairs are created during the course of a relativistic heavy ion collision. For charges created early, balancing charges are typically separated by the order of one unit of spatial rapidity by the end of the collision, whereas those charges produced later in the collision are far more correlated. By analyzing correlations from STAR for different species, I show that one can distinguish the two separate waves of charge creation expected in a high-energy collision, one at early times when the QGP is formed and a second at hadronization. Further, I extract the density of up, down and strange quarks at in the QGP and find agreement at the 20% level with expectations for a chemically thermalized plasma.

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arXiv2012

What does it mean to have `seen' the quark-gluon plasma?

Identifying the quark-gluon plasma requires convincing experimental evidence that partons move independently throughout the environment created in a heavy ion collision and with densities expected from equilibrium considerations. In lattice calculations, charge correlations suggest that quarks exist independently, and are not merely exchanged from hadronic object to another. Many experimental signatures (J/Psi suppression, quark number scaling, etc.) suggest that quarks are not confined to their original singlets, but these signatures do not make a clear case that quarks move independently or that they have the expected densities. I discuss a class of measurements that parallel lattice observables and has the prospect of investigating whether partonic charges move independently.

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arXiv2012

Identifying the Charge Carriers of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Charge correlations in lattice gauge calculations suggest that up, down and strange charges move independently in the QGP (quark-gluon plasma), and that the density of such charges is similar to what is expected from simple thermal arguments. Here, we show how specific elements of the charge-charge correlation matrix in the QGP survive hadronization and become manifest in final-state charge-charge correlation measurements.

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arXiv2012

Viscous Hydrodynamics and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

The matter created in relativistic heavy ion collisions is fairly well described by ideal hydrodynamics, and somewhat better described by viscous hydrodynamics. To this point, most viscous calculations have been two-dimensional, based on an assumption of Bjorken boost invariance along the beam axis. Here, first results are presented for a fully three-dimensional viscous model. The model is described and tests of the numerical accuracy of the code are presented. Two- and three-dimensional runs are compared, and modest changes are observed for mid-rapidity observables at the highest RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) energies.

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arXiv2012

General Charge Balance Functions, A Tool for Studying the Chemical Evolution of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

In the canonical picture of the evolution of the quark-gluon plasma during a high-energy heavy-ion collision, quarks are produced in two waves. The first is during the first fm/c of the collision, when gluons thermalize into the QGP. After a roughly isentropic expansion that roughly conserves the number of quarks, a second wave ensues at hadronization, 5-10 fm/c into the collision. Since each hadron contains at least two quarks, the majority of quark production occurs at this later time. For each quark produced in a heavy-ion collision, an anti-quark of the same flavor is created at the same point in space-time. Charge balance functions identify, on a statistical basis, the location of balancing charges for a given hadron, and given the picture above one expects the distribution in relative rapidity of balancing charges to be characterized by two scales. After first demonstrating how charge balance functions can be created using any pair of hadronic states, it will be shown how one can identify and study both processes of quark production. By considering balance functions of several hadronic species, and by performing illustrative calculations, this class of measurement appears to hold the prospect of providing the field's most stringent insight into the chemical evolution of the QGP.

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