Effects of initial-state nucleon shadowing on the elliptic flow of thermal photons

Abstract

Recently the effect of nucleon shadowing on the Monte-Carlo Glauber initial condition was studied and its role on the centrality dependence of elliptic flow ($v_2$) and fluctuations in initial eccentricity for different colliding nuclei were explored. It was found that the results with shadowing effects are closer to the QCD based dynamical model as well as to the experimental data. Inspired by this outcome, in this work we study the transverse momentum ($p_T$) spectra and elliptic flow of thermal photons for Au+Au collisions at RHIC and Pb+Pb collisions at LHC by incorporating the shadowing effects in deducing the initial energy density profile required to solve the relativistic hydrodynamical equations. We find that the thermal photon spectra remain almost unaltered, however, the elliptic flow of photon is found to be enhanced significantly due to shadowing effects.