The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe can accelerate gold or lead nuclei, stripped of their electrons, to over 99.9999% of the speed of light and collide them. The high-momentum jets produced in these collisions can create Mach waves as they travel inside the subatomic droplets at near the speed of light which is much faster than the speed of sound .

A team led by Xin-Nian Wang and Long-gang Pang from Central China Normal University (CCNU) used their developed Linear Boltzmann Transport (LBT) model and relativistic hydrodynamics model (CLVisc) to study these phenomena. They discovered that the diffusion wake accompanying the Mach cone generates a distinctive three-dimensional structure in the jet-hadron correlation function.

This correlation structure provides an excellent probe for identifying Mach cone waves inside the quark-gluon plasma droplets in the final-state particle distributions. The findings were published inPhysical Review Letterson February 2, 2023. The authors include Xin-Nian Wang, CCNU PhD student Yang Zhong, Long-gang Pang, postdoctoral researcher Wei Chen from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (currently a Distinguished Associate Professor at Wuhan University of Science and Technology), and postdoctoral researcher Luo Qin from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.