Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Magneto-hydrodynamics for Relativistic Heavy-ion Collisions

Shreyansh Shankar Dave

IMSc

ery strong magnetic fields can arise in non-central heavy-ion
collisions at ultra-relativistic energies,
which may not decay quickly in a conducting plasma. We carry out
relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics (RMHD)
simulations to study the effects of this magnetic field on the evolution of
the fluid and on resulting flow
fluctuations in the ideal RMHD limit. Our results show that the magnetic
field leads to enhancement in elliptic
flow for small impact parameters while it suppresses it for large impact
parameters. Interestingly, we find that
magnetic field in localized regions can temporarily increase in time as
evolving fluid energy density fluctuations lead to reorganization of
magnetic flux. This can have important effects on the chiral magnetic
effect. We discuss
the situation of nontrivial magnetic field configurations arising from
collision of deformed nuclei and show that it can lead to anomalous elliptic
flow. Special (crossed body-body) configurations of deformed nuclei
collisions can lead to the presence of a quadrupolar magnetic field, which
can have very important effects on the rapidity dependence of transverse expansion (similar to beam focusing from quadrupole fields in accelerators).