Effects of magnetic field on plasma evolution in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Very strong magnetic fields can arise in noncentral heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies, and may not decay quickly in a conducting plasma. We carry out relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD) simulations to study the effects of this magnetic field on the evolution of the plasma 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 (which may provide a signal for the initial stage magnetic field). Interestingly, we find that magnetic field in localized regions can temporarily increase in time as evolving plasma energy density fluctuations lead to reorganization of magnetic flux. This can have important effects on the chiral magnetic effect. The magnetic field has nontrivial effects on the power spectrum of flow fluctuations. For the very strong magnetic field case, one sees a pattern of even-odd difference in the power spectrum of flow coefficients arising from reflection symmetry about the magnetic field direction if initial state fluctuations are not dominant. 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).