Higher-order anisotropic flows v4β and v6β in heavy ion collisions at
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are studied in a multiphase transport model
that has previously been used successfully for describing the elliptic flow
v2β in these collisions. We find that the same parton scattering cross
section of about 10 \textrm{mb} used in explaining the measured v2β can also
reproduce the recent data on v4β and v6β from Au + Au collisions at
sβ=200 \textrm{AGeV}. It is further found that the is a more
sensitive probe of the initial partonic dynamics in these collisions than
v2β. Moreover, higher-order parton anisotropic flows are nonnegligible and
satisfy the scaling relation vn,qβ(pTβ)βΌv2,qn/2β(pTβ), which
leads naturally to the observed similar scaling relation among hadron
anisotropic flows when the coalescence model is used to describe hadron
production from the partonic matter.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, version to appear in PRC as a Rapid Communicatio