Speaker
Description
An important ongoing program in high-energy nuclear physics is the exploration of the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at large values of temperature and/or densities. In that regime, QCD predicts the existence of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) state, in which quarks are deconfined and can move freely over distances comparable with the size of hadrons. Results from heavy-ion collision data at LHC are consistent with the scenario in which QGP
undergoes collective expansion, dominated by its hydrodynamic response to the anisotropies in the initial state geometry — a phenomenon known as anisotropic
flow. Properties of QGP are typically portrayed by specifying its
transport properties (e.g. shear or bulk viscosities), or its equation of state.
In this talk, anisotropic flow results obtained from multi-particle
correlation techniques are presented. Special focus is given to recently developed new flow observables (symmetric and asymmetric cumulants of multi-harmonic flow correlations, symmetry plane correlations) [1,2], each of which by
design extract new and independent information about QGP properties. By using Bayesian parameter estimation methods, it is demonstrated how the temperature-dependent
specific shear and bulk viscosity of QGP can be constrained from experimental data [3,4].
