Azimuthally differential pion femtoscopy in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV with ALICE at the LHC

Femtoscopy of non-central heavy ion collisions provides access to information on the geometry of the effective pion-emitting source. In particular, the source shape can be studied by measuring femtoscopic radii as a function of the pion emission angle relative to the collision symmetry planes. We present the results of azimuthally differential femtoscopy of Pb-Pb collisions at \(\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76\) TeV at the LHC relative to the second harmonic event plane. We observe a clear oscillation of the extracted radii as a function of the emission angle. We find that \(R_{side}\) and \(R_{out}\) oscillate out of phase for all centralities and pion transverse momenta. The relative amplitude of \(R_{side}\) oscillation decreases in more central collisions, but remains positive, which indicates that the source remains out-of-plane extended qualitatively similar to what was observed at RHIC energies. We compare our results to existing hydrodynamical and transport model calculations.