Timmins, Anthony2018-11-292018-11-29May 20182018-05May 2018http://hdl.handle.net/10657/3408The mission of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is to create an extremely hot and dense medium where the quarks and gluons become deconfined from their typical hadronic states. This unique state of matter is known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The collective flow of the system plays a critical role in establishing the equation of state of the QGP. Among different orders of azimuthal flow, the second order elliptic flow receives keen attention and will be analyzed in the ultra-central collision centrality range. Various hydrodynamic simulations show that $v_n$ correlates almost linearly with the initial eccentricity $\varepsilon_n$ of the system (which fluctuates on an event by event basis). This indicates that the measurement of $v_n$ fluctuations are extremely sensitive to the initial state configuration. This thesis will analyze higher order cumulants, and investigate how they can constrain the initial state. The second order flow ($v_2$) from 2, 4, and 6-particle correlations for LHC Runs 10 and 11 of Pb-Pb collisions at the center of mass energy $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV are presented. A series of statistical and systematic uncertainty checks for data collected from Run 10 and Run 11 was performed, and the usefulness of the measured results in their theoretical context will be discussed.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).Anisotropic flowV2Second order flowCollective expansionQgpQuark-gluon plasmaHigh energy physics2018-11-29Thesisborn digital