Jet quenching effects on the direct, elliptic, and triangular flow at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

In this paper we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) may affect the direct, elliptic, and triangular flow of low (and intermediate) pT hadrons in central Au+Au collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The dijets are modeled as external sources in the energy-momentum conservation equations for hydrodynamics, which are solved on an event-by-event basis within the ideal-fluid approximation. We focus our investigation at midrapidity and solve the hydrodynamic equations by imposing boost invariance. Differential anisotropic flow coefficients for pT1GeV are found to be significantly enhanced if the dijets deposit on average more than 12 GeV in the QGP (or more than 6 GeV per jet). Because this extra energy and momentum added to the medium perturbs the geometry-induced hydrodynamic expansion, the correlation between the v2 and v3 coefficients (for pT 1GeV) and their corresponding initial eccentricities are considerably weakened. In addition, we argue that the extra amount of direct flow induced by dijets may be quantified by comparing the azimuthal dependence of dihadron correlations in dijet events with the corresponding quantity obtained in events without dijets. This comparison could be used to give a rough estimate of the magnitude of the effective coupling between the jets and the medium.