1204.2815 (Lingshan Xu et al.)

Model-independent decomposition of flow and nonflow in relativistic
heavy-ion collisions    [PDF]

Lingshan Xu, Li Yi, Daniel Kikola, Joshua Konzer, Fuqiang Wang, Wei Xie

We propose a method to separate \Delta\eta-dependent and independent azimuthal correlations using two- and four-particle cumulants between pseudo-rapidity (\eta) bins in symmetric heavy-ion collisions. The \Delta\eta-independent correlation may be dominated by harmonic flows, a global correlation to the common collision geometry. The \Delta\eta-dependent correlation can be identified as nonflow, particle correlations unrelated to the common geometry. Our method exploits the \eta symmetry of the average harmonic flows and is model-independent. We use the AMPT and HIJING event generators to illustrate our method. We discuss the decomposed flow and nonflow of the models.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2815