Studies of azimuthal dihadron correlations in ultra-central PbPb collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 2.76 TeV

Azimuthal dihadron correlations of charged particles have been measured in PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV by the CMS collaboration, using data from the 2011 LHC heavy-ion run. The data set includes a sample of ultra-central (0-0.2% centrality) PbPb events collected using a trigger based on total transverse energy in the hadron forward calorimeters and the total multiplicity of pixel clusters in the silicon pixel tracker. A total of about 1.8 million ultra-central events were recorded, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 120 inverse microbarns. The observed correlations in ultra-central PbPb events are expected to be particularly sensitive to initial-state fluctuations. The single-particle anisotropy Fourier harmonics, from v[2] to v[6], are extracted as a function of particle transverse momentum. At higher transverse momentum, the v[2] harmonic becomes significantly smaller than the higher-order v[n] (n greater than or equal to 3). The pt-averaged v[2] and v[3] are found to be equal within 2%, while higher-order v[n] decrease as n increases. The breakdown of factorization of dihadron correlations into single-particle azimuthal anisotropies is observed. This effect is found to be most prominent in the ultra-central PbPb collisions, where the initial-state fluctuations play a dominant role. A comparison of the factorization data to hydrodynamic predictions with event-by-event fluctuating initial conditions is also presented.