Beam energy dependence of Elliptic and Triangular flow with the AMPT model

Abstract

A beam energy scan has been carried out at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory to search for the onset of deconfinement and a possible critical point where the transition from a Quark Gluon Plasma to a hadronic phase changes from a rapid cross-over to a first order phase transition. Anisotropy in the azimuthal distribution of produced particles such as the second and third harmonics $v_2$ and $v_3$ are expected to be sensitive to the existence of a Quark Gluon Plasma phase and the Equation of State of the system. For this reason, they are of great experimental interests. In this Letter we report on calculations of $v_2$ and $v_3$ from the AMPT model in the Default(Def.) and String Melting(SM) mode to provide a reference for the energy dependence of $v_2$ and $v_3$ for $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}$ from 7.7 GeV to 2.76 TeV. We expect that in the case that collisions cease to produce QGP at lower colliding energies, data will deviate from the AMPT String Melting calculations and come in better agreement with the Default calculations.