Non-Spherical Shapes of the Proton: Existence, Measurement, and Computation

Eccentric protons? Sensitivity of flow to system size and shape in p+p, p+Pb, and Pb+Pb collisions

We determine the transverse system size of the initial nonequilibrium Glasma state and of the hydrodynamically evolving fireball as a function of produced charged particles in p+p, p+Pb, and Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Our results show features similar to those of recent measurements of Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) radii by the ALICE Collaboration. Azimuthal anisotropy coefficients vn generated by combining the early time Glasma dynamics with viscous fluid dynamics in Pb+Pb collisions are in excellent agreement with experimental data for a wide range of centralities. In particular, event-by-event distributions of the vn values agree with the experimental data out to fairly peripheral centrality bins. In striking contrast, our results for p+Pb collisions significantly underestimate the magnitude and do not reproduce the centrality dependence of data for v2 and v3 coefficients. We argue that the measured vn data and HBT radii strongly constrain the shapes of initial parton distributions across system sizes that would be compatible with a flow interpretation in p+Pb collisions. Alternately, additional sources of correlations may be required to describe the systematics of long-range rapidity correlations in p+p and p+Pb collisions.