  We discuss opportunities that may arise from subjecting high-multiplicity
events in relativistic heavy ion collisions to an analysis similar to the one
used in cosmology for the study of fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB). To this end, we discuss examples of how pertinent features of
heavy ion collisions including global characteristics, signatures of collective
flow and event-wise fluctuations are visually represented in a Mollweide
projection commonly used in CMB analysis, and how they are statistically
analyzed in an expansion over spherical harmonic functions. If applied to the
characterization of purely azimuthal dependent phenomena such as collective
flow, the expansion coefficients of spherical harmonics are seen to contain
redundancies compared to the set of harmonic flow coefficients commonly used in
heavy ion collisions. Our exploratory study indicates, however, that these
redundancies may offer novel opportunities for a detailed characterization of
those event-wise fluctuations that remain after subtraction of the dominant
collective flow signatures. By construction, the proposed approach allows also
for the characterization of more complex collective phenomena like higher-order
flow and other sources of fluctuations, and it may be extended to the
characterization of phenomena of non-collective origin such as jets.
