Hydrodynamic fluctuations and ultra-central flow puzzle in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

One of the long-standing problems in the field of high-energy heavy-ion collisions is that the dynamical models based on viscous hydrodynamics fail to describe the experimental elliptic flow $v_2$ and the triangular flow $v_3$ simultaneously in ultra-central collisions. The problem, known as the "ultra-central flow puzzle", is specifically that hydrodynamics-based models predict the flow ratio of the two-particle cumulant method $v_2\{2\}/v_3\{2\} > 1$ while $v_2\{2\}/v_3\{2\} \sim 1$ in the experimental data. In this Letter, we focus on the effects of hydrodynamic fluctuations during the space-time evolution of the QGP fluid on the flow observables in the ultra-central collisions. Using the (3+1)-dimensional integrated dynamical model which includes relativistic fluctuating hydrodynamics, we analyze the anisotropic flow coefficients $v_n\{2\}$ in 0-0.2% central Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\text{NN}}=2.76~\text{TeV}$. We find that the hydrodynamic fluctuations decrease the model overestimate of $v_2\{2\}/v_3\{2\}$ from the experimental data by about 19% within the present setup of $η/s = 1/2π$. This means that the hydrodynamic fluctuations qualitatively have an effect to improve the situation for the puzzle, but the effect of the hydrodynamic fluctuations alone is quantitatively insufficient to resolve the puzzle. The decrease of the ratio largely depends on the shear viscosity $η/s$, which calls for future comprehensive analyses with, for example, a realistic temperature-dependent viscosity.