Fluctuating initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions from the Glauber approach

TL;DR

This paper analyzes initial shape fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions using Glauber models, comparing different variants and their effects on eccentricity and flow observables, with implications for jet quenching and hydrodynamic predictions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantitative comparison of shape fluctuations across multiple Glauber-based models and derives analytic formulas for multipole moments and their fluctuations.

Findings

Eccentricity fluctuations vary significantly across models.

Scaled standard deviation of participant eccentricity is weakly model-dependent.

Shape fluctuations impact jet quenching only in very central collisions.

Abstract

In the framework of the Glauber approach we analyze the shape parameters of the early-formed system and their event-by-event fluctuations. We test a variety of models: the conventional wounded nucleon model, a model admixing binary collisions to the wounded nucleons, a model with hot spots, as well as the hot-spot model where the deposition of energy occurs with a superimposed probability distribution. We look in detail at the so-called participant multipole moments, obtained by an averaging procedure where in each event the system is translated to its center of mass and aligned with the major principal axis of the ellipse of inertia. Quantitative comparisons indicate substantial relative effects for eccentricity in variants of Glauber models. On the other hand, the dependence of the scaled standard deviation of the participant eccentricity on the chosen model is weak. For all models the values range from about 0.5 for the central collisions to about 0.3-0.4 for peripheral collisions, both for the gold-gold and copper-copper collisions. They are dominated by statistics and change only by 10-15% from model to model. We provide an approximate analytic expansion for the multipole moments and their fluctuations given in terms of the fixed-axes moments. For central collisions and in the absence of correlations it gives the simple formula for the scaled standard deviation of the participant eccentricity: sqrt(4/pi-1). Similarly, we obtain expansions for the radial profiles of the multipole distributions. We investigate the relevance of the shape-fluctuation effects for jet quenching and find them important only for very central events. Finally, we argue how smooth hydro leads to the known result v_4 ~ v_2^2, and further to the prediction Delta v_4/v_4 = 2 Delta v_2/v_2.