Anisotropic flow measurements at FAIR and SPS energies

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) at FAIR and the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN SPS aim to study the area of the QCD phase diagram at high net baryon densities and moderate temperatures using heavy ion collisions. The FAIR and SPS accelerators cover energy ranges 2-11 and 13-150 GeV per nucleon respectively in laboratory frame for heavy ions up to Au and Pb. One of the key observables to study the properties of a matter created in such collisions is anisotropic transverse flow of particles. In this work the performance of the CBM experiment for anisotropic flow measurements is studied with Monte-Carlo simulations using gold ions at SIS-100 energies employing different heavy-ion event generators. Also procedures for centrality estimation and charged hadron identification are described and corresponding frameworks are developed. The measurement of the reaction plane angle is performed with Projectile Spectator Detector (PSD), which is a hadron calorimeter located at very forward angle. To prevent radiation damage by the high intensity ion beam, the PSD has a hole in the center to let the beam pass through. Various combinations of CBM detector subsystems are used to investigate the possible systematic biases in flow and centrality measurements. Effects of detector azimuthal non-uniformity and the PSD beam hole size on physics performance are studied. The resulting performance of CBM for flow measurements is demonstrated for identified charged hadron anisotropic flow as a function of rapidity and transverse momentum in different centrality classes. The measurement techniques developed for CBM were also validated with the experimental data recently collected by the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN SPS for Pb+Pb collisions at the beam momenta 30\AGeVc. Compared to the existing data from the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS, the new data allows for more precise measurement of anisotropic flow harmonics. The fixed target setup of NA61/SHINE also allows to extend flow measurements available from the STAR at RHIC beam energy scan (BES) program to a wide rapidity range up to the forward region where projectile nucleon spectators appear. In this thesis an analysis of the anisotropic flow harmonics in Pb+Pb collisions at beam momenta 30\AGeVc collected by the NA61/SHINE experiment in the year 2016 is presented. Flow coefficients are measured relative to the spectator plane estimated with the Projectile Spectators Detector (PSD). The flow coefficients are obtained as a function of rapidity and transverse momentum in different classes of collision centrality. The results are compared with the corresponding NA49 data and the measurements from the RHIC BES program.