Speaker
Description
Collisions of heavy ions at ultrarelativistic energies at RHIC and at the LHC are an excellent tool to reach extreme temperatures and/or baryon densities, where the QCD matter undergoes a phase transition to a state of deconfined quarks and gluons, called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). One of the many probes which can provide insight into the properties of this medium, are measurements of anisotropic flow. They are sensitive in particular to transport coefficients of the QGP, and the initial state of a heavy-ion collision, essential for proper theoretical description of the subsequent medium evolution.
Characteristic flow features believed to originate in this collectively expanding medium were also observed in high-multiplicity collisions of small systems, such as pp or pA collisions. It is still under debate whether their origin lies in the creation of a medium with similar nature as the one created in heavy-ion collisions.
In this talk, I will discuss recent results in this area. I will highlight their improving ability to provide precise constraints to theoretical calculations of large systems and to help to pin down the origin of the observations in small systems and implications to our current understanding of the QGP. I will conclude with an outlook to the potential future investigations in this topic.
