Universality of the saturation scale and the initial eccentricity in heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Recent estimates that Color Glass Condensate initial conditions may generate a larger initial eccentricity for noncentral relativistic heavy ion collisions (relative to the initial eccentricity assumed in earlier hydrodynamic calculations) have raised the possibility of a higher bound on the viscosity of the Quark Gluon Plasma. We show that this large initial eccentricity results in part from a definition of the saturation scale as proportional to the number of nucleons participating in the collision. A saturation scale proportional to the nuclear thickness function (and therefore independent of the probe) leads to a smaller eccentricity, albeit still larger than the value used in hydrodynamic models. Our results suggest that the early elliptic flow in heavy ion collisions (unlike multiplicity distributions) is sensitive to the universality of the saturation scale in high energy QCD.