Universal flow-driven conical emission in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

Phys Rev Lett. 2010 Nov 26;105(22):222301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.222301. Epub 2010 Nov 24.

Abstract

The double-peak structure observed in soft-hard hadron correlations is commonly interpreted as a signature for a Mach cone generated by a supersonic jet interacting with the hot and dense medium created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. We show that it can also arise due to averaging over many jet events in a transversally expanding background. We find that the jet-induced away-side yield does not depend on the details of the energy-momentum deposition in the plasma, the jet velocity, or the system size. Our claim can be experimentally tested by comparing soft-hard correlations induced by heavy-flavor jets with those generated by light-flavor jets.