Applications of Persistent Homology in Nuclear Collisions

Abstract: We introduce a novel set of observables associated to the rapidly developing field of persistent homology for the quantitative characterization of nuclear collisions and their evolution. Persistent homology allows for the identification of topological and homological characteristics of distributions in multi-dimensional spaces. We demonstrate here how to apply the toolset of persistent homology to the extraction of novel clustering signatures and the identification of long-range flow correlations in the particle production process of nuclear collisions.