Reconstructing the impact parameter of proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions

The impact parameter of a heavy-ion collision is not a directly measurable quantity but is inferred, e.g., from the amount of particles or energy measured by a specific detector. That relationship, however, is not one-to-one. The authors devise an interesting method to reconstruct the impact parameters for relativistic proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions in all experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, without reference to any particular model, using a Bayesian approach. This should facilitate better comparisons between model calculations and data.