Energy loss as the origin of an universal scaling law of the elliptic flow

Abstract: It is shown that the excellent scaling of the elliptic flow found for all centralities, species and energies from RHIC to the LHC for $p_{T}$ less than the saturation momentum is a consequence of the energy lost by a parton interacting with the color field produced in a nucleus-nucleus collision. In particular, the deduced shape of the scaling curve describes correctly all the data. We discuss the possible extensions to higher $p_{T}$, proton-nucleus and proton-proton collisions as well as higher harmonics.