Complementary Approach to Anisotropic Flows in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

We introduce a no-reaction-plane (no-RP) method for extracting directed (\(v_1\)) and elliptic (\(v_2\)) flows in heavy-ion collisions, which eliminates the need for event-plane reconstruction. %by scanning over fixed test angles and using simple count asymmetries. The method is validated with PHSD model simulations of Au+Au collisions at \(\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 9.2\) GeV at freeze-out (for impact parameters \(b = 4-8\) fm). We demonstrate that the two asymmetries for each harmonic contribute equally, i.e., \(\langle A_{\mathrm{ud}}^2\rangle \approx \langle A_{\mathrm{lr}}^2\rangle\) and \(\langle A_1^2\rangle \approx \langle A_2^2\rangle\), so that a single asymmetry measurement suffices for a good flow estimate. Event-by-event comparisons with direct calculations using the true reaction plane yield Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.956 for \(v_2\) and 0.834 for \(v_1\), confirming that the no-RP method captures flow fluctuations well enough.