Anisotropic flow and the valence quark skeleton of hadrons

Abstract

We study transverse momentum anisotropies, in particular, the elliptic flow v2 due to the interference effect sourced by valence quarks in high-energy hadron-hadron collisions. Our main formula is derived as the high-energy (eikonal) limit of the impact-parameter dependent cross section in quantum field theory, which agrees with that in terms of the impact parameter in the classical picture. As a quantitative assessment of the interference effect, we calculate v2 in the azimuthal distribution of gluons at a comprehensive coverage of the impact parameter and the transverse momentum in high-energy pion-pion collisions. In a broad range of the impact parameter, a sizable amount of v2, comparable with that produced due to saturated dense gluons or final-state interactions, is found to develop. This is in contrast with similar studies in heavy-ion collisions using classical color charge distributions in which such a contribution from geometric correlations was found to be small and has, hence, been ignored in recent studies. In our calculations, the valence sector of the pion wave function is obtained numerically from the Basis Light-Front Quantization, a non-perturbative light-front Hamiltonian approach. And our formalism is generic and can be applied to other small collision systems like proton-proton collisions.