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<pT<4 GeV/c trigger particle with two softer 1<pT<2 GeV/c particles. Results are shown for pp, d+Au and high statistics Au+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV. 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 pT of the associated particles can be used to distinguish conical flow from simple QCD-Cerenkov radiation. An important aspect of the analysis is the subtraction of combinatorial backgrounds. Systematic uncertainties due to this subtraction and the flow harmonics v2 and v4 are investigated in detail.
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