Elliptic flow from colour strings

Abstract

It is shown that the elliptic flow can be successfully described in the colour string picture with fusion and percolation provided anisotropy of particle emission from the fused string is taken into account. Two possible sources of this anisotropy are considered, propagation of the string in the transverse plane and quenching of produced particles in the strong colour field of the string. Calculations show that the second source gives an overwhelming contribution to the flow at accessible energies. We obtain an almost equal elliptic flow dependence on p_T for the LHC and RHIC energies in agreement with the recent ALICE data.