2025/11/12 by Alqahtani, Mubarak, Ollitrault, Jean-Yves
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.09283
The ALICE Collaboration has analyzed a number of cumulants mixing elliptic flow (v2) and triangular flow (v3), involving up to 8 particles, in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC. We unravel an unexpected simplicity in these complex mathematical quantities for collisions at fixed impact parameter. We show that as one increases the order in v2, for a given order in v3, the changes in the cumulants are solely determined by the mean elliptic flow in the reaction plane, which originates from the almond-shaped geometry of the overlap area between the colliding nuclei. We derive simple analytic relations between cumulants of different orders on this basis. Some of these relations are in reasonable agreement with existing data. We postulate that agreement will be much improved if the analysis is repeated with a finer centrality binning and a larger pseudorapidity acceptance.