Factorization of event-plane correlations over transverse momentum in relativistic heavy ion collisions in a multi-phase transport model

Abstract: Momentum-space azimuthal harmonic event planes (EP) are constructed from final-state midrapidity particles binned in transverse momentum (pT ) in sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions in a multi-phase transport (AMPT) model. The EP correlations between pT bins, corrected by EP resolutions, are smaller than unity. This indicates that the EP's decorrelate over pT in AMPT, qualitatively consistent with data and hydrodynamic calculations. It is further found that the EP correlations approximately factorize into single pT-bin EP correlations to a common plane. This common plane appears to be the momentum-space EP integrated over all pT, not the configuration space participant plane (PP).