On feasibility of azimuthal flow studies with Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

It is shown that the Principal Component Analysis applied to azimuthal single-particle distributions allows to perform flow analysis in ways that are analogous to the traditional approaches based on multi-particle correlations. In particular, symmetric cumulants are considered. It is demonstrated also that statistical fluctuations due to a finite number of particles per event practically do not play a role for higher order PCA-based cumulants.