Eur. Phys. J. C (2011) 71: 1558
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1558-9

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Elliptic flow from colour strings

¹ University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
² S. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia

^* e-mail: braun1@pobox.spbu.ru

Received: 2 August 2010
Revised: 3 January 2011
Published online: 22 February 2011

Abstract

It is shown that the elliptic flow can be successfully described in the colour string picture with fusion and percolation provided anisotropy of particle emission from the fused string is taken into account. Two possible sources of this anisotropy are considered, propagation of the string in the transverse plane and quenching of produced particles in the strong colour field of the string. Calculations show that the second source gives an overwhelming contribution to the flow at accessible energies. We obtain an almost equal elliptic flow dependence on p _T for the LHC and RHIC energies in agreement with the recent ALICE data.