Azimuthal flow in hadron collisions from quark-gluon string repulsion

Abstract

Color flux tubes (quark-gluon strings), formed at early stages of hadron-hadron collisions, may overlap in case of sufficiently high densities and interact, producing long-range azimuthal correlations. In the hypothesis of repulsive interaction, each string may acquire, before the hadronization, the additional transverse boost, which is an efficient sum of all accounted string-string interactions. This modifies transverse momenta to the particles formed in string decay, leading to modification of event-wise observables, like azimuthal asymmetry of two-particle correlations, over a wide range of rapidity. In this article we discuss results of Monte Carlo model with string repulsion, where efficient string-string interaction radius is introduced. We show that the effect of string repulsion can be the main dynamic origin of the elliptic flow and of the higher harmonics, which are reflected in the complicated structures observed in two-particle long-range correlation topology in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and at LHC.