Eur. Phys. J. A (2017) 53: 124
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2017-12312-8

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Investigating the NCQ scaling of elliptic flow at LHC with a multiphase transport model

¹ Key Laboratory of Quark and Lepton Physics (MOE) and Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University, 430079, Wuhan, China
² School of Mathematics and Statistics, Central China Normal University, 430079, Wuhan, China

^* e-mail: liangzhphy@gmail.com

Received: 11 January 2017
Accepted: 8 May 2017
Published online: 14 June 2017

Abstract

The number of constituent quark (NCQ) scaling behavior of elliptic flow has been systematically studied at the LHC energy within the framework of a multiphase transport model (AMPT) in this work. With the variation of the fragmentation parameters, collision centrality and system energy, we find that the initial conditions of parton dynamics are more important than the final state parton cascade process for the existence of NCQ scaling when the hadronic interaction is off in Pb-Pb collisions. By turning on the hadron interaction process, the impacts of hadronic evolution are found to be responsible for a significant violation to the well established scaling structure. Our study suggests that the interpretation of NCQ scaling is not only subject to the hadronization mechanism but also to the initial conditions of parton evolution as well as the hadronic interactions especially for the LHC experiments.