English

Implications of space-momentum correlations and geometric fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions

Nuclear Experiment 2015-03-13 v2

Abstract

The standard picture of heavy-ion collisions includes a collective expansion. If the initial energy density in the collisions is lumpy, then a collective expansion can convert that spatial lumpiness into correlations between final-state particles. Correlations measurements in heavy-ion collisions show several prominent features not present in proton-proton collisions. I argue that many features of these correlations are related to the transference of over-densities from the initial overlap region into momentum-space during the quark gluon plasma phase of the expansion. I show results from a toy Monte-Carlo to illustrate the consequences of lumpy initial conditions and a collective expansion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1002.4878,
  title  = {Implications of space-momentum correlations and geometric fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions},
  author = {Paul Sorensen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.4878},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures, invited talk at SQM2009 in Buzios: updated for minor referee comments and corrections to dN/dphi distributions.