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 (5)

• Parton shower evolution in a 3-d hydrodynamical medium
• The sound produced by a fast parton in the quark-gluon plasma is a "crescendo"
• Mach cones in the quark-gluon plasma: Viscosity, speed of sound, and effects of finite source structure
• Energy deposition in hard dihadron triggered events in heavy-ion collisions
• Comparing different freeze-out scenarios in azimuthal hadron correlations induced by fast partons