Skewness of elliptic flow fluctuations

Using event-by-event hydrodynamic calculations, we find that the fluctuations of the elliptic flow (v2) in the reaction plane have a negative skew. We compare the skewness of v2 fluctuations to that of initial eccentricity fluctuations. We show that skewness is the main effect lifting the degeneracy between higher-order cumulants, with negative skew corresponding to the hierarchy v2{4}>v2{6} observed in Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We describe how the skewness can be measured experimentally and show that hydrodynamics naturally reproduces its magnitude and centrality dependence.