EMMI Workshop: Light-ion collisions 2026

The correlation between the mean transverse momentum and elliptic flow has emerged as a powerful observable for probing nuclear and sub-nuclear structure. In this talk, we present the study of higher-order cumulants involving the mean transverse momentum and elliptic flow. We provide hydrodynamic predictions for these cumulants in both heavy-ion and light-ion collisions and discuss how they can be exploited to extract additional information about nuclear structure, complementing the conventional mean transverse momentum--$v_2$ correlator that has already been measured experimentally. Furthermore, we derive quantitative relations connecting the cumulants of the mean transverse momentum with different moments of the harmonic flow. Hydrodynamic simulations are found to satisfy these relations. Those relations could be used to test experimentally the collective hydrodynamic origin of the observed correlations between the mean transverse momentum and harmonic flow in both heavy-ion and light-ion collisions.
Ref. : https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26737