Event-by-event fluctuations in a perturbative QCD + saturation + hydrodynamics model: Determining QCD matter shear viscosity in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We introduce an event-by-event perturbative-QCD + saturation + hydro (“EKRT”) framework for ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, where we compute the produced fluctuating QCD-matter energy densities from next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD using a saturation conjecture to control soft-particle production and describe the space-time evolution of the QCD matter with dissipative fluid dynamics, event by event. We perform a simultaneous comparison of the centrality dependence of hadronic multiplicities, transverse momentum spectra, and flow coefficients of the azimuth-angle asymmetries against the LHC and RHIC measurements. We compare also the computed event-by-event probability distributions of relative fluctuations of elliptic flow and event-plane angle correlations with the experimental data from Pb + Pb collisions at the LHC. We show how such a systematic multienergy and multiobservable analysis tests the initial-state calculation and the applicability region of hydrodynamics and, in particular, how it constrains the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity-to-entropy ratio of QCD matter in its different phases in a remarkably consistent manner.