Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Anisotropy of flow and the order of phase transition in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Pasi Huovinen

Univeristy of Virginia

The lattice QCD calculations predict a cross over phase transition from hadronic matter to quark-gluon plasma. In this talk I will discuss how the phase transition affects final particle spectra and anisotropies in a hydrodynamical model of a heavy ion collision. It turns out that the effect on proton distributions is large enough to be experimentally observable but the data favours first order phase transition instead of a cross over.