Multi-particle azimuthal correlations for extracting event-by-event elliptic and triangular flow in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}=200$ GeV

Abstract

We present measurements of elliptic and triangular azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles detected at forward rapidity $1<|\hat{I}\cdot |<3$ in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}=200$ GeV, as a function of centrality. The multiparticle cumulant technique is used to obtain the elliptic flow coefficients $v_2\{2\}$, $v_2\{4\}$, $v_2\{6\}$, and $v_2\{8\}$, and triangular flow coefficients $v_3\{2\}$ and $v_3\{4\}$. Using the small-variance limit, we estimate the mean and variance of the event-by-event $v_2$ distribution from $v_2\{2\}$ and $v_2\{4\}$. In a complementary analysis, we also use a folding procedure to study the distributions of $v_2$ and $v_3$ directly, extracting both the mean and variance. Implications for initial geometrical fluctuations and their translation into the final state momentum distributions are discussed.

323 authors from 67 institutions, 17 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables. v2 is version accepted for publication by Physical Review C. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html