Understanding anisotropy generated by fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions

Understand

Event-by-event fluctuations are central to the current understanding of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

• In particular, fluctuations in the geometry of the early-time collision system are responsible for new phenomena such as triangular flow, which have solved important puzzles in existing data.
• We propose a simple model where initial fluctuations stem from independent flux tubes randomly distributed in the transverse plane.
• We calculate analytically the moments of the initial anisotropies (dipole asymmetry, eccentricity, triangularity), which are the sources of anisotropic flow, and their mutual correlations.