Elliptic flow

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions produce very large numbers of subatomic particles in all directions. In such collisions, flow refers to how energy, momentum, and number of these particles varies with direction, and elliptic flow is a measure of how the flow is not uniform in all directions when viewed along the beam-line. Elliptic flow is strong evidence for the existence of quark–gluon plasma, and has been described as one of the most important observations measured at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).