Counting hot/cold spots in quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

We study how local fluctuations in the initial states of relativistic heavy-ion collisions manifest themselves in the correlations between different orders of harmonic moments of the density profiles, particularly those involving only odd harmonics which purely arise from initial state fluctuations. We find the strengths of those correlations are sensitive to the number of hot and cold spots in the initial states. Hydrodynamic evolution of the fireball translates initial state geometric anisotropies as well as their correlations into final state momentum anisotropies and correlations. We conclude that the measurement of the correlations between different harmonic moments of final state azimuthal distribution can be employed to quantify the inhomogeneity of the initial density profiles such as the population of hot and cold spots that are produced in high energy nuclear collisions.