Correlation between mean transverse momentum and anisotropic flow in heavy-ion collisions

Understand

The correlation between the mean transverse momentum of outgoing particles, $\langle p_t \rangle$, and the magnitude of anisotropic flow, $v_n$, has recently been measured in Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, as a function of the collision centrality.

• We confirm the previous observation that event-by-event hydrodynamics predicts a correlation between $v_n$ and $\langle p_t \rangle$ that is similar to that measured in data.
• We show that the magnitude of this correlation can be directly predicted from the initial condition of the hydrodynamic calculation, for $n=2,3$, if one replaces $v_n$ by the corresponding initial-state anisotropy, $\varepsilon_n$, and $\langle p_t\rangle$ by the total energy per unit rapidity of the fluid at the beginning of the hydrodynamic expansion.