Feasibility of the elliptic flow measurements in pp@LHC using the Lee–Yang zero method

This paper presents the results of an attempt to measure the elliptic flow in the smallest collision system (pp) at the highest designed collision energy at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using the genuine collective correlation among a large number of particles. A huge non-flow effect introduced by a strong jet correlation in pp collisions makes the application of the standard event plane flow analysis non-feasible. Therefore, in order to measure a possible elliptic flow in pp collisions, the Lee-Yang zero method is used in HIJING-simulated events for the LHC top energy of root s = 14 TeV on which an additional subevent with elliptic flow is superimposed. The Lee-Yang zero method has been tested in two cases with different ratios between the numbers of particles generated in the two subevents. The applied method has successfully reproduced the shape of the differential eta and P-T elliptic flow dependencies, and on average its magnitude taking into account all involved particles, albeit with huge fluctuations.