Azimuthal flow in hadron collisions from quark-gluon string repulsion

Color flux tubes (quark-gluon strings), formed at early stages of hadron-hadron collisions, may overlap in case of sufficiently high densities and interact, producing long-range azimuthal correlations. In the hypothesis of repulsive interaction, each string may acquire, before the hadronization, the additional transverse boost, which is an efficient sum of all accounted string-string interactions. This modifies transverse momenta to the particles formed in string decay, leading to modification of event-wise observables, like azimuthal asymmetry of two-particle correlations, over a wide range of rapidity. In this article we discuss results of Monte Carlo model with string repulsion, where efficient string-string interaction radius is introduced. We show that the effect of string repulsion can be the main dynamic origin of the elliptic flow and of the higher harmonics, which are reflected in the complicated structures observed in two-particle long-range correlation topology in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and at LHC.Comment: 9 pages, http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20161250401

Classifiers for centrality determination in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions

Centrality, as a geometrical property of the collision, is crucial for the physical interpretation of nucleus-nucleus and proton-nucleus experimental data. However, it cannot be directly accessed in event-by-event data analysis. Common methods for centrality estimation in A-A and p-A collisions usually rely on a single detector (either on the signal in zero-degree calorimeters or on the multiplicity in some semi-central rapidity range). In the present work, we made an attempt to develop an approach for centrality determination that is based on machine-learning techniques and utilizes information from several detector subsystems simultaneously. Different event classifiers are suggested and evaluated for their selectivity power in terms of the number of nucleons-participants and the impact parameter of the collision. Finer centrality resolution may allow to reduce impact from so-called volume fluctuations on physical observables being studied in heavy-ion experiments like ALICE at the LHC and fixed target experiment NA61/SHINE on SPS.Comment: To be published in proceedings of the "XIIth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference (Thessaloniki, 2016

Forward–backward Correlations Between Mean Transverse Momenta in Pb–Pb Collisions with ALICE

Forward-backward (FB) correlations are considered to be a powerful tool for the exploration of the early dynamics of hadronic interactions. The FB correlation functions can be constructed from different observables calculated event-by-event in two separated pseudorapidity regions. We report measurements of event-by-event average transverse momentum correlations for charged particles in two separated pseudorapidity regions in Pb–Pb collisions at