Anisotropic flow decorrelation in heavy-ion collisions with event-by-event viscous hydrodynamics

Abstract

Decorrelation of the elliptic flow in rapidity is calculated within a hybrid approach which includes event-by-event viscous fluid dynamics and final state hadronic cascade model. The simulations are performed for Au+Au collisions at center-of-mass collision energies of 27 and 200 GeV per nucleon pair, as well as various colliding systems at 72 GeV per nucleon pair. Initial conditions determined by an extended Monte Carlo Glauber model show better agreement with experimental data than initial conditions from the UrQMD transport model. We show how the observed decorrelation is connected with the decorrelation of initial state spatial anisotropies. We also study how the effect is increased by the final state hadronic cascade.