Hydrodynamic modeling of pseudorapidity flow correlations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and the torque effect

Abstract

We analyze correlations between the event-plane angles in different intervals of pseudorapidity within the 3+1-dimensional viscous hydrodynamics with the Glauber-model initial conditions. As predicted earlier, the fluctuations in the particle production mechanism in the earliest stage, together with asymmetry of the emission profiles in pseudorapidity from the forward- and backward going wounded nucleons, lead to the torque effect, namely, decorrelation of the event-plane angles in distant pseudorapidity bins. We use two- or three-bin measures of correlation functions to quantify the effect, with the latter compared to the recent data from the CMS collaboration. We find a sizable torque effect, with magnitude larger at RHIC than at the LHC.