Study of the hottest droplet of fluid through correlations and fluctuations of collective variables

TL;DR

This thesis investigates fluctuations and correlations of collective variables like flow coefficients and mean transverse momentum in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, providing new insights into initial state properties and nuclear deformation.

Contribution

It introduces novel methods to analyze flow fluctuations, correlations, and their impact on understanding initial state and nuclear deformation in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Fluctuations of harmonic flow can be probed via factorization-breaking coefficients.

Model explains the steep fall of $[p_T]$ variance observed by ATLAS.

Predictions for skewness, kurtosis, and impact parameter fluctuations.

Abstract

In this thesis, we focus on the fluctuations and correlations of the collective observables such as the mean transverse momentum per particle ($[p_T]$) and harmonic flow coefficients ($v_n$) of particles produced in the ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC. Specifically, we show that the fluctuations of harmonic flow can be probed by the factorization-breaking coefficients between flow vectors in different $p_T$-bins. Experimental difficulty can be reduced by taking one of the flow vectors momentum averaged. Fluctuations cause a decorrelation between the flow vectors, which can be attributed to equal contributions from the flow magnitude and flow angle decorrelation. We study fluctuations of mean transverse momentum per particle ($[p_T]$) in ultra-central collisions and show that our model can explain the steep fall of its variance observed by the ATLAS collaboration. We also present robust predictions for the skewness and kurtosis, and highlight the role of impact parameter fluctuations in ultracentral collisions. We study the Pearson correlation coefficients between $[p_T]$ and $v_n^2$, which can map the initial state correlations between the shape and size of the fireball. We show that higher order normalized and symmetric cumulants between these observables can be constructed, which put useful additional constraints on the initial state properties. Furthermore, we study the momentum dependent Pearson correlation between $[p_T]$ and the transverse momentum dependent flow. It shows sensitivity to the Gaussian width of the nucleon at the initial state. Finally, we show that such correlations and fluctuations of collective observables can be used to study nuclear deformation and put robust constraints on their deformation parameters through high energy nuclear collisions.