Directed flow at mid-rapidity in event-by-event hydrodynamics

Fernando G. Gardim, Frederique Grassi, Yogiro Hama, Matthew Luzum, Jean-Yves Ollitrault

Published 2011-03-23, updated 2011-06-22Version 2

Fluctuations in the initial geometry of a nucleus-nucleus collision have been recently shown to result in a new type of directed flow (v_1) that, unlike the usual directed flow, is also present at midrapidity. We compute this new v_1 versus transverse momentum and centrality for Au-Au collisions at RHIC using the hydrodynamic code NeXSPheRIO. We find that the event plane of v_1 is correlated with the angle of the initial dipole of the distribution, as predicted, though with a large dispersion. It is uncorrelated with the reaction plane. Our results are in excellent agreement with results inferred from STAR correlation data.