Abstract
Heavy-ion collisions at small beam energies have the potential to reveal the rich phase structure of QCD at low temperature and nonzero density. In this case spatially modulated regimes with a “moat” spectrum can arise, where the minimum of the energy is over a sphere at nonzero momentum. We show that if the matter created in heavy-ion collisions freezes out in such a regime, particle numbers and their correlations peak at nonzero, instead of zero, momentum. This effect is much more dramatic for multiparticle correlations than for single-particle spectra. Our results can serve as a first guideline for a systematic search of spatially modulated phases in heavy-ion collisions.
- Received 23 March 2021
- Revised 9 June 2021
- Accepted 8 September 2021
- Corrected 3 March 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.152302
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
3 March 2022
Correction: An erroneous statement in the Acknowledgments section has been removed.
