New estimator for symmetry plane correlations in anisotropic flow analyses

Correlations of symmetry planes are important observables used to quantify anisotropic flow phenomenon and constrain independently the properties of strongly interacting nuclear matter produced in the collisions of heavy ions at the highest energies. In this paper, we point out current problems of measuring correlations between symmetry planes and elaborate on why the available analysis techniques have a large systematic bias. To overcome this problem, we introduce a new approach to approximate multi-harmonic flow fluctuations via a two-dimensional Gaussian distribution. Employing this approximation, we introduce a new estimator, dubbed Gaussian Estimator (GE), to extract pure correlation between symmetry planes. We validate GE by using the realistic event-generator iEBE-VISHNU and demonstrate that it outperforms all existing estimators. Based on event-shape engineering, we propose an experimental procedure to improve GE accuracy even further.

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