The Sound of the Little Bangs

Understand

Measurements of particles emitted from collisions of heavy ions at relativistic energies show evidence for temperature-fluctuations on the freeze-out surface of the expanding fireball.

• These can be understood as remnants of the density inhomogeneities in the initial collision overlap region.
• In this paper we present an analysis of heavy-ion collisions analogous to the analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
• We use data on transverse momentum correlations to extract a power-spectrum from heavy-ion collisions and use a Glauber model for eccentricity to extract the transfer function needed to produce the observed correlations.