Decomposition of flow and nonflow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We propose a method to separate \Delta\eta-dependent and \Delta\eta-independent azimuthal correlations using two- and four-particle cumulants between pseudo-rapidity (\eta) bins in symmetric heavy-ion collisions. The \Delta\eta-independent correlation may be dominated by harmonic flows, a global correlation to the common collision geometry. The \Delta\eta-dependent correlation can be identified as nonflow, particle correlations unrelated to the common geometry. Our method exploits the \eta symmetry of the average harmonic flows and is "data-driven." We use the AMPT and HIJING event generators to illustrate our method. We discuss the decomposed \Delta\eta-independent and \Delta\eta-dependent correlations regarding flow and nonflow in the models.