Jet quenching effects on the direct, elliptic, and triangular flow at RHIC

In this paper we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma may affect the direct, elliptic and triangular flow of low (and intermediate) $p_T$ hadrons in central Au+Au collisions at RHIC. 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 mid-rapidity and solve the hydrodynamic equations imposing boost invariance. Differential anisotropic flow coefficients for $p_T \gtrsim 1$ GeV 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 jet-induced extra anisotropic flow is not related to the fluctuations of the initial geometry of the collision, the correlation between the $v_2$ and $v_3$ coefficients and their corresponding eccentricities is 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.