Identified particle spectra and anisotropic flow in an event-by-event hybrid approach in Pb plus Pb collisions at √sNN=2.76 TeV

The first results from heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider for charged-particle spectra and elliptic flow are compared to an event-by-event hybrid approach with an ideal hydrodynamic expansion. This approach has been shown to successfully describe bulk observables at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Without changing any parameters of the calculation, the same approach is applied to Pb + Pb collisions at root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV. This is an important test if the established understanding of the dynamics of relativistic heavy ion collisions is also applicable at even higher energies. Specifically, we employ the hybrid approach with two different equations of state and the pure hadronic transport approach to indicate sensitivities to finite viscosity. The centrality dependence of the charged hadron multiplicity, pT spectra, and differential elliptic flow are shown to be in reasonable agreement with the ALICE Collaboration data. Furthermore, we make predictions for the transverse mass spectra of identified particles and triangular flow. The eccentricities and their fluctuations are found to be surprisingly similar to the ones at lower energies, and therefore, the triangular flow results are very similar. Any deviations from these predictions will indicate the need for different physics mechanisms responsible for the dynamics of heavy ion collisions.