Universal Flow-Driven Conical Emission in Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

Understand

The double-peak structure observed in soft-hard hadron correlations is commonly interpreted as a signature for a Mach cone generated by a supersonic jet interacting with the hot and dense medium created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

• We show that it can also arise due to averaging over many jet events in a transversally expanding background.
• We find that the jet-induced away-side yield does not depend on the details of the energy-momentum deposition in the plasma, the jet velocity, or the system size.
• Our claim can be experimentally tested by comparing soft-hard correlations induced by heavy-flavor jets with those generated by light-flavor jets.