Are There Mach Cones in Heavy Ion Collisions? Three-Particle Correlations from STAR

Abstract

We present results from STAR on 3-particle azimuthal correlations for a $3<p_T<4$ GeV/c trigger particle with two softer $1<p_T<2$ GeV/c particles. Results are shown for pp, d+Au and high statistics Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200GeV$. We observe a 3-particle correlation in central Au+Au collisions which may indicate the presence of conical emission. In addition, the dependence of the observed signal angular position on the $p_T$ of the associated particles can be used to distinguish conical flow from simple QCD-Čerenkov radiation. An important aspect of the analysis is the subtraction of combinatorial backgrounds. Systematic uncertainties due to this subtraction and the flow harmonics $v_2$ and $v_4$ are investigated in detail.

Poster shown at Quark Matter 2006, Shanghai, China. 6 Pages, 6 Figures

Cited by in corpus (2)

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