Anisotropic flow from AGS to LHC energies

Abstract

Within hydrodynamics we study the effects of the initial spatial anisotropy in non-central heavy-ion collisions on the momentum distributions of the emitted hadrons. We show that the elliptic flow measured at midrapidity in 158 A GeV/c Pb+Pb collisions can be quantitatively reproduced by hydrodynamic expansion, indicating early thermalization in the collision. We predict the excitation functions of the 2nd and 4th harmonic flow coefficients from AGS to LHC energies and discuss their sensitivity to the quark-hadron phase transition.