Anisotropic flow and flow fluctuations for Au plus Au at √sNN=200 GeV in a multiphase transport model

Anisotropic flow coefficients and their fluctuations are investigated for Au + Au collisions at center-of-mass energy root s(NN) = 200 GeV by using a multiphase transport model with string melting scenario. Experimental results of azimuthal anisotropies by means of the two- and four-particle cumulants are generally well reproduced by the model including both parton cascade and hadronic rescatterings. Event-by-event treatments of the harmonic flow coefficients v(n) (for n = 2, 3, and 4) are performed, in which event distributions of vn for different orders are consistent with Gaussian shapes over all centrality bins. Systematic studies on centrality, transverse momentum (p(T)), and pseudorapidity (eta) dependencies of anisotropic flows and quantitative estimations of the flow fluctuations are presented. The p(T) and eta dependencies of absolute fluctuations for both v(2) and v(3) follow trends similar to their flow coefficients. Relative fluctuation of triangular flow v(3) is slightly centrality dependent, which is quite different from that of elliptic flow v(2). It is observed that parton cascade has a large effect on the flow fluctuations, but hadronic scatterings make little contribution to the flow fluctuations, which indicates flow fluctuations are mainly modified during partonic evolution stage.