Elliptic flow: a brief review

Abstract

One of the fundamental questions in the field of subatomic physics is the question of what happens to matter at extreme densities and temperatures as may have existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang and exists, perhaps, in the core of dense neutron stars. The aim of heavy-ion physics is to collide nuclei at very high energies and thereby create such a state of matter in the laboratory. The experimental program began in the 1990s with collisions made available at the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), and continued at the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) with the maximum centerof- mass energies of p sNN = 4.75, 17.2 and 200 GeV, respectively. Collisions of heavy ions at the unprecedented energy of 2.76 TeV recently became available at the LHC collider at CERN. In this review, I give a brief introduction to the physics of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions and discuss the current status of elliptic flow measurements.