Differential flow correlations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

A systematic analysis of correlations between different orders of $p_T$-differential flow is presented, including mode coupling effects in flow vectors, correlations between flow angles (a.k.a. event-plane correlations), and correlations between flow magnitudes, all of which were previously studied with integrated flows. We find that the mode coupling effects among differential flows largely mirror those among the corresponding integrated flows, except at small transverse momenta where mode coupling contributions are small. For the fourth- and fifth-order flow vectors $V_4$ and $V_5$ we argue that the event plane correlations can be understood as the ratio between the mode coupling contributions to these flows and and the flow magnitudes. We also find that for $V_4$ and $V_5$ the linear response contribution scales linearly with the corresponding cumulant-defined eccentricities but not with the standard eccentricities.