Elliptic flow of resonances at RHIC: probing final state interactions and the structure of resonances

C. Nonaka, M. Asakawa, S. A. Bass, R. J. Fries, B. Mueller

Published 2003-12-18, updated 2004-02-18Version 2

We propose the measurement of the elliptic flow of hadron resonances at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as a tool to probe the amount of hadronic final state interactions for resonances at intermediate and large transverse momenta. This can be achieved by looking at systematic deviations of the measured flow coefficient $v_2$ from the scaling law given by the quark recombination formalism. Our method can be generalized to explore the structure of exotic particles, such as the recently found pentaquark $\Theta^+ (1540)$.