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Revealing the Harmonic Structure of Nuclear Two-Body Correlations in High-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions

Thomas Duguet1,*, Giuliano Giacalone2,†, Sangyong Jeon3,‡, and Alexander Tichai4,5,6,§

  • *Contact author: thomas.duguet@cea.fr
  • †Contact author: giuliano.giacalone@cern.ch
  • ‡Contact author: sangyong.jeon@mcgill.ca
  • §Contact author: alexander.tichai@tu-darmstadt.de
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 182301 – Published 28 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/v2z7-wlnr

Abstract

Smashing nuclei at ultrarelativistic speeds and analyzing the momentum distribution of outgoing debris provides a powerful method to probe the many-body properties of the incoming nuclear ground states. Within a perturbative description of initial-state fluctuations in the quark-gluon plasma, we express the measurement of anisotropic flow in ultracentral heavy-ion collisions as the quantum-mechanical average of a specific set of operators measuring the harmonic structure of the two-body azimuthal correlations among nucleons in the colliding states. These observables shed a new light on spatial correlations in atomic nuclei while enabling us to test the complementary pictures of nuclear structure delivered by low- and high-energy experiments on the basis of state-of-the-art theoretical approaches rooted in quantum chromodynamics.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 182301– Published 28 October, 2025
  • Received 30 May 2025
  • Revised 26 August 2025
  • Accepted 6 October 2025
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