Flavor Ordering of Elliptic Flows at High Transverse Momentum

Based on the quark coalescence model for the parton-to-hadron phase transition in relativistic heavy ion collisions, we relate the elliptic flow (v₂) of high p_T hadrons to that of high p_T quarks. For high p_T hadrons produced from an isospin-symmetric and quark-antiquark–symmetric partonic matter, magnitudes of their elliptic flows follow a flavor ordering as (v_2,π=v_2,N)>(v_2,Λ=v_2,Σ)>v_2,K>v_2,Ξ>(v_2,ϕ=v_2,Ω) if strange quarks have a smaller elliptic flow than light quarks. The elliptic flows of high p_T hadrons further follow a simple quark counting rule if strange quarks and light quarks have the same high p_T spectrum and coalescence probability.