Event shape engineering with ALICE

Abstract

The strong fluctuations in the initial energy density of heavy-ion collisions allow an efficient selection of events corresponding to a specific initial geometry. For such "shape engineered events", the elliptic flow coefficient, $v_2$, of unidentified charged particles, pions and (anti-)protons in Pb-Pb collisions at $\snn = 2.76$ TeV is measured by the ALICE collaboration. $v_2$ obtained with the event plane method at mid-rapidity, $|\eta|<0.8$, is reported for different collision centralities as a function of transverse momentum, $\pt$, out to $\pt=20$ GeV/$c$. The measured $v_2$ for the shape engineered events is significantly larger or smaller than the average which demonstrates the ability to experimentally select events with the desired shape of the initial spatial asymmetry.