Using CMBR analysis tools for flow anisotropies in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Recently we have shown that there are crucial similarities in the physics of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and the flow anisotropies in relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments (RHICE). We also argued that, following CMBR anisotropy analysis, a plot of root-mean square values of the flow coefficients, calculated in a lab fixed frame for RHICE, can yield important information about the nature of initial state anisotropies and their evolution. Here we demonstrate the strength of this technique by showing that elliptic flow for non-central collisions can be directly determined from such a plot without any need for the determination of event-plane.