Exploring the centrality dependence of elliptic and triangular flows

V. L. Korotkikh, A. M. Snigirev

Published 2020-07-09Version 1

A detailed study of elliptical and triangular eccentricities in the initial state of relativistic heavy ion collisions is presented. A model of randomly distributed sources of energy density in the transverse plane based on the effective theory of Color Glass Condensate is used. This model describes well the ALICE and ATLAS data for Pb+Pb collisions at center-of-mass energy 5.02 TeV per nucleon pair in a wide range of centralities, if the second $v_2$ and third $v_3$ harmonics of the anisotropic flow are simply implied to be proportional to the eccentricities $\varepsilon_2$ and $\varepsilon_3$ as a reasonable approximation. The eccentricity $\varepsilon_2$ is closely related with the collision geometry and its centrality dependence is mainly determined by the edge diffuseness of the region of the uniform distribution of the saturation pulse of the oncoming nucleus. The eccentricity $\varepsilon_3$ is completely determined by the chaotic fluctuations of the source position in the region of overlapping nuclei and is substantially dependent on the overlap area only.