Reaction plane alignment with linearly polarized photon in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to determine the reaction plane in heavy-ion collisions by utilizing the linear polarization feature of coherent photoproduction, offering potential advantages over traditional techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new approach to extract the reaction plane using linear polarization in coherent photoproduction, enhancing initial geometry measurements in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Demonstrated the feasibility of reaction plane determination via polarization features.

Compared advantages of the new method with traditional approaches.

Highlighted potential improvements in initial collision geometry analysis.

Abstract

The collective observables play critical roles in probing the properties of quark-gluon-plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, in which the information on initial collision geometry is crucial. However, the initial collision geometry, e.g., the reaction plane, cannot be directly extracted in the experiment. In this paper, we demonstrate the idea of determining the reaction plane via the feature of linear polarization of the coherent photoproduction process and discuss the advantages of the proposed approach in comparison with traditional methods.