Flow harmonics from self-consistent particlization of a viscous fluid

Abstract

The quantitative extraction of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) properties from heavy-ion data, such as its specific shear viscosity $\eta /s$, typically requires comparison to viscous hydrodynamic or "hybrid" hydrodynamics+transport simulations. In either case, one has to convert the fluid to hadrons, yet without additional theory input the conversion is ambiguous for dissipative fluids. Here, shear viscous phase-space corrections calculated using linearized transport theory are applied in Cooper-Frye freezeout to quantify the effects on anisotropic flow coefficients $v_n(p_T)$ at both RHIC and LHC energies. Expanding upon our previous flow harmonics studies [1,2], we calculate pion and proton $v_2(p_T)$, $v_4(p_T)$, and $v_6(p_T)$. Unlike in Ref. [1], we incorporate a hadron gas that is chemically frozen below a temperature of 175 MeV, and use hypersurfaces from realistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations. With additive quark model cross sections and relative phase-space corrections with $p^{3/2}$ momentum dependence, rather than the quadratic Grad form, we find at moderately high transverse momentum noticeably higher $v_4(p_T)$ and $v_6(p_T)$ for protons than for pions. In addition, the value of $\eta /s$ deduced from elliptic flow data differs by nearly 50\% from the value extracted using the naive "democratic Grad" form of freeze-out distributions. To facilitate the use of the self-consistent viscous corrections calculated here in hydrodynamic and hybrid calculations, we also present convenient parameterizations of the corrections for the various hadron species (cf. Table I).