Longitudinal structure of the quark-gluon plasma from differently shaped nuclei

Abstract

Ultrarelativistic collisions of atomic nuclei produce the quark--gluon plasma (QGP), an extremely hot, dense state of matter. The QGP behaves like a nearly perfect fluid, so its final-state momentum distributions can be inverted to reveal its initial-state geometry. This programme has succeeded in the transverse plane but made less progress along the beam, where short-range nonflow correlations mask the longitudinal signal. Anisotropic flow has been successfully used to image the shapes of the colliding nuclei; here we use nuclear shape to image the QGP's 3D geometry---the same idea in reverse. We show in simulations that the nonflow can be removed by comparing collisions of nuclei with similar masses but different shapes. We find that nuclear deformation changes the magnitude of the elliptic flow but not its longitudinal profile, so the shape difference recovers the full longitudinal structure. The predicted two-particle decorrelation map reveals both a highly non-linear rapidity dependence inaccessible to conventional observables, and an unquantified bias in standard flow measurements themselves. Our strategy extends to the longitudinal dependence of the QGP's triangularity and size. Nuclear shape thus becomes a tool for 3D imaging of the QGP and the quantum fluctuations of the nuclear wavefunctions that seed it.

Comments: 12 pages, 11 figures