Limitation of multi-particle correlations for studying the event-by-event distribution of harmonic flow in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The sensitivity of flow harmonics from cumulants on the event-by-event flow distribution $p(v_n)$ is investigated using a simple central moment expansion approach. For narrow distribution whose width is much smaller than the mean ${\sigma }_n\ll <v_n>$, the difference between the first three higher-order cumulant estimates $v_n\{4\}$, $v_n\{6\}$ and $v_n\{8\}$ are not very sensitive to the shape of $p(v_n)$. For broad distribution ${\sigma }_n\gtrsim <v_n>$, the higher-order cumulant estimates differ from each other but may change sign and become ill-defined. This sign change arises from the choice of $p(v_n)$, without the need to invoke non-flow effects. Direct extraction of $p(v_n)$ via a data-driven unfolding method is a more preferred approach for flow distribution measurement.

9 pages, 3 figures, replaced with published version

References in corpus (11)

• Observation of long-range near-side angular correlations in proton-lead collisions at the LHC
• Multi-particle azimuthal correlations in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
• Elliptic flow in the Gaussian model of eccentricity fluctuations
• Initial State Fluctuations and Final State Correlations in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Universal fluctuation-driven eccentricities in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions
• Measurement of flow harmonics with multi-particle cumulants in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Forward-backward eccentricity and participant-plane angle fluctuations and their influences on longitudinal dynamics of collective flow
• Event-shape fluctuations and flow correlations in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Eccentricity distributions in nucleus-nucleus collisions
• Fluctuation induced equality of multi-particle eccentricities for four or more particles
• Elucidating the event-by-event flow fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions via the event shape selection technique

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Experimental overview on small collision systems at the LHC
• Energy dependence and fluctuations of anisotropic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{{\text{s}}_{\text{NN}}}=5.02$ and $2.76$ TeV
• Revealing long-range multi-particle collectivity in small collision systems via subevent cumulants
• Hydrodynamic Collectivity in Proton--Proton Collisions at 13 TeV
• Skewness of elliptic flow fluctuations
• Fluctuations of anisotropic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Progress and Challenges in Small Systems
• A flow paradigm in heavy-ion collisions
• Multiparticle azimuthal cumulants in p+Pb collisions from a multiphase transport model
• Anisotropic flow fluctuations in hydro-inspired freeze-out model for relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Kurtosis of elliptic flow fluctuations
• Non-Bessel-Gaussianity and Flow Harmonic Fine-Splitting
• Symmetric cumulant $s{c}_{2,4}\left\{4\right\}$ and asymmetric cumulant $a{c}_2\left\{3\right\}$ from transverse momentum conservation and flow