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| Format: | Recurso digital |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19340137 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p>This paper examines the ratio of two-particle to four-particle flow cumulants across four collision systems measured by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider: proton-proton, proton-lead, xenon-xenon, and lead-lead collisions. The analysis reveals a striking anomaly: symmetric collision systems show a two-particle cumulant excess over the four-particle cumulant ranging from 13% to 33%, while the asymmetric proton-lead system exhibits a 76% excess—more than double any symmetric system.</p> <p>This pattern cannot be explained by system size, collision energy, or detector acceptance. The paper interprets this anomaly through the lens of assembly ambiguity and source coherence. In symmetric collisions, correlation sources combine coherently, whether from a single hard process or collective hydrodynamic flow. In asymmetric proton-lead collisions, the proton interacts with multiple nucleons in the lead nucleus, generating several independent nucleon-nucleon collisions that produce incoherent correlation sources. The two-particle cumulant sums all pairwise contributions from these sources, while they partially cancel in the four-particle cumulant.</p> <p>The findings suggest that caution is warranted when interpreting two-particle correlation measurements as evidence for collectivity in asymmetric collision systems, as such measurements may overstate the true collective component. The analysis uses publicly available ALICE Collaboration data released via the CERN Open Data Portal.</p>