Speaker
Summary
There have been strong interests in the field of heavy ion physics about the dominant contribution of two-particle correlations in small systems such as pp and pA collisions. One of the most successful explanations of the multi-particle correlation phenomenon comes from the relativistic hydrodynamics approach, which generates correlations during the so-called hydrodynamic evolution in the final states of particle productions. Meanwhile, the color glass condensate framework, which is an initial state effect, can also provide significant collective effects between produced particles.
Using the color glass condensate framework, we investigate the azimuthal angular correlation between a heavy quarkonium and a charged light hadron in proton-nucleus collisions. We extract the second harmonic v2, commonly known as the elliptic flow, with the light hadron as the reference. This particular azimuthal angular correlation between a heavy meson and a light hadron was first measured at the LHC recently. The experimental results indicate that the elliptic flows for heavy flavor mesons are almost as large as those for light hadrons. Recent study has shown that the final state interactions (including hydrodynamical evolutions) can only provide a small fraction of the observed v2. Our calculation demonstrates that this result can be naturally interpreted as an initial state effect due to the interaction between the incoming partons from the proton and the dense gluons inside the target nucleus. In addition, we also make prediction for v2 of other heavy mesons, which can be tested in future measurements.
