Building up the elliptic flow: analytical insights

Understand

In this paper, we present a fully analytical description of the early-stage formation of elliptic flow in relativistic viscous hydrodynamics.

• We first construct an elliptic deformation of Gubser flow which is a boost invariant solution of the Navier-Stokes equation with a nontrivial transverse profile.
• We then analytically calculate the momentum anisotropy of the flow as a function of time and discuss the connection with the empirical formula by Bhalerao {\it et al.} regarding the viscosity dependence of elliptic flow.