A Review of Elliptic Flow of Light Nuclei in Heavy-Ion Collisions at RHIC and LHC Energies

Abstract

We present a review of the measurements of elliptic flow (v₂) of light nuclei (d, ¯d, t, 3He, and 3¯He) from the RHIC and LHC experiments. Light (anti)nuclei v₂ have been compared with that of (anti)proton. We observed a similar trend in light nuclei v₂ to that in identified hadron v₂ with respect to the general observations such as pT dependence, low pT mass ordering, and centrality dependence. We also compared the difference of nuclei and antinuclei with the corresponding difference of v₂ of proton and antiproton at various collision energies. Qualitatively they depict similar behavior. We also compare the data on light nuclei to various theoretical models such as blast-wave and coalescence. We then present a prediction of v₂ for ³He and ⁴He using coalescence and blast-wave models.