The rise and fall of the ridge

✍ Scribed by Paul Sorensen

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 261 KB
• Volume: 855
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0375-9474
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2011.02.046

✦ Synopsis

Recent data from heavy ion collisions at RHIC show unexpectedly large near-angle correlations that broaden longitudinally with centrality. The amplitude of this ridge-like correlation rises rapidly with centrality, reaches a maximum, and then falls in the most central collisions. In this talk we explain how this behavior can be easily understood in a picture where final momentum-space correlations are driven by initial coordinate space density fluctuations. We propose v 2 n /ε 2 n,part as a useful way to study these effects and explain what it tells us about the collision dynamics.