Measurements of Hadronic Elliptic Flows at PHENIX

Abstract

One of the key tasks of the PHENIX experiment is studying the properties of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). An efficient method for studying the properties of the QGP is measuring the azimuthal anisotropy of particle production in ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy ions. The azimuthal anisotropy is characterized by the coefficients of the Fourier transform of the function of particle distribution over the azimuthal angle. The measurement of the second coefficient of the Fourier transform (\({{v}_{2}}\)), which is called the elliptic flow, makes it possible to investigate the collective behavior of nuclear matter and, thus, to study the QGP properties. In this study, a review of the recent results of measurement of hadron elliptic flows as a function of the transverse momentum and centrality of nuclei collisions in the PHENIX experiment is presented. The data of measured values of \({{v}_{2}}\) for neutral and charged hadrons in the Cu + Au and Au + Au collisions at energy \(\sqrt {{{s}_{{NN}}}} \) = 200 GeV are presented.