Two-particle correlations in pseudorapidity in a hydrodynamic model

TL;DR

This study uses viscous hydrodynamics to analyze two-particle pseudorapidity correlations in Pb+Pb collisions, highlighting the significant impact of resonance decays and proposing methods to isolate flow-related correlations.

Contribution

The paper introduces an accurate, binning-independent method to compute correlation coefficients and a double expansion technique to study pseudorapidity correlations between flow harmonics.

Findings

Resonance decays account for 60-70% of the observed correlation coefficients.

The proposed methods effectively separate flow and non-flow effects in pseudorapidity correlations.

The double expansion approach enables analysis of higher-order cumulants to reduce non-flow contributions.

Abstract

Two-particle pseudorapidity correlations of hadrons produced in Pb+Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider are analyzed in the framework of a model based on viscous 3+1-dimensional hydrodynamics with the Glauber initial condition. Based on our results, we argue that the correlation from resonance decays, formed at a late stage of the evolution, produce significant effects. In particular, their contribution to the event averages of the coefficients of the expansion in the Legendre basis explain 60-70% of the experimental values. We have proposed an accurate way to compute these <a_n a_m> coefficients, independent of the binning in pseudorapidity, and tested a double expansion of the two-particle correlation function in the azimuth and pseudorapidity, which allows us to investigate the pseudorapidity correlations between harmonics of the collective flow. In our model, these quantities are also dominated by non-flow effects from the resonance decays. Finally, our method can be used to compute higher-order cumulants for the expansion in orthonormal polynomials which offers a suitable way of eliminating the non-flow effects from the correlation analyses.