Credit: Javier Orjuela Koop, University of Colorado, Boulder
If collisions between small projectiles—protons (p), deuterons (d), and helium-3 nuclei (3He)—and gold nuclei (Au) create tiny hot spots of quark-gluon plasma, the pattern of particles picked up by the detector should retain some "memory" of each projectile's initial shape. Measurements from the PHENIX experiment match these predictions with very strong correlations between the initial geometry and the final flow patterns.