Hydrodynamic description of direct photon spectrum and elliptic flow in Pb + Pb collisions at LHC

Abstract

In high energy heavy ion collisions a new state of matter, the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma is formed that exhibits similar properties as the Universe had couple of microseconds after the Big Bang, hence such collisions are usually referred as Little Bangs. Subsequent investigations showed that the created medium is a nearly perfect fluid whose time evolution can be described by hydrodynamic models. The distribution of the hadrons that are created in the freeze-out after a rapid expansion carry information about the final state. On the other hand, with penetrating probes, e.g., with direct photons, one can model the time evolution of the quark gluon plasma. In this paper, we present a hydrodynamic model that was inspired by an analytical solution of the equation of relativistic hydrodynamics. The invariant transverse momentum spectrum and the elliptic flow of direct photons were calculated, the model parameters were obtained by comparison the calculations to LHC ALICE data. Based on the results we give an estimation for the initial temperature of the plasma.