Effects of momentum conservation and flow on angular correlations observed in experiments at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Correlations of azimuthal angles observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have gained great attention due to the prospect of identifying fluctuations of parity-odd regions in the field sector of QCD. Whereas the observable of interest related to parity fluctuations involves subtracting opposite-sign from same-sign correlations, the STAR collaboration reported the same-sign and opposite-sign correlations separately. It is shown here how momentum conservation combined with collective elliptic flow contributes significantly to this class of correlations, although not to the difference between the opposite-and same-sign observables. The effects are modeled with a crude simulation of a pion gas. Although the simulation reproduces the scale of the correlation, the centrality dependence is found to be sufficiently different in character to suggest additional considerations beyond those present in the pion gas simulation presented here.