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

Understand

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.