Jet quenching effects on the anisotropic flow at RHIC

Abstract

In this article we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma may perturb the geometry-induced hydrodynamic expansion of the bulk nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. The coupling between the jets and the medium is done through a source term in the energy-momentum conservation equations for ideal hydrodynamics. We concentrate our attention at mid-rapidity and solve the equations event-by-event imposing boost-invariance. For $p_T \gtrsim 1$ GeV the anisotropic flow is found to be considerably enhanced, if the dijets deposit on average more than 12 GeV in the medium (or equivalently 6 GeV for each jet of the pair), which corresponds, in our model, to an average suppression greater than $65\%$ of the initial jet transverse energy.