Elliptic flow in ultrarelativistic collisions with light polarized nuclei

Estimates for elliptic flow in collisions of polarized light nuclei with spin $j\ensuremath{\ge}1$ with a heavy nucleus are presented. In such collisions, the azimuthal symmetry is broken via polarization of the wave function of the light nucleus, resulting in a nonzero one-body elliptic flow coefficient evaluated relative to the polarization axis. For the case of the deuteron we carry out the Glauber Monte Carlo simulations of the initial state followed with hydrodynamics to obtain the elliptic flow coefficient. A careful statistical error analysis is presented, showing that the effect could be easily spotted in future experiments with data samples of sizes as low as $\ensuremath{\approx}{10}^{4}$. We also present estimates of the effect for collisions with other light $j\ensuremath{\ge}1$ nuclei, involving experimentally well-known features, such as their quadrupole moments and the charge radii. We find the one-body elliptic flow coefficient in the range from $\ensuremath{\approx}0.5$% for collisions with a deuteron to $\ensuremath{\approx}5%$ for collisions with a $^{10}\mathrm{B}$ nucleus, with the relative error being small for typical data sample multiplicities. Prospects of addressing the issue in the upcoming fixed-target experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider are discussed.