Hydrodynamic elliptic and triangular flow in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt(s)=2.76ATeV

Abstract

It is shown that a simultaneous comparison of both elliptic and triangular flow from (2+1)-dimensional viscous fluid dynamics with recent measurements in Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) favors a small specific shear viscosity (eta/s)_QGP approximately equal to 1/(4pi) for the quark-gluon plasma. Using this viscosity value, the relative magnitude of the elliptic and triangular flow is well described with Monte-Carlo Glauber (MC-Glauber) initial conditions while Monte-Carlo Kharzeev-Levin-Nardi (MC-KLN) initial conditions require twice as large viscosity to reproduce the elliptic flow and then underpredict triangular flow by about 30%.