New measures of longitudinal decorrelation of harmonic flow

Abstract

Harmonic flow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is observed in a broad range of rapidities, and the flow at different rapidities is correlated. However, fluctuations lead to a small decorrelation of the harmonic flow magnitudes and flow angles at different rapidities. Using a hydrodynamic model with Glauber Monte Carlo initial conditions we show that the flow angle decorrelation strongly depends on the flow magnitude in the event. We propose observables to measure this effect in experiment.