Schematic of different uranium collision geometries (IMAGE)

DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory

Schematic of different uranium collision geometries

Caption

Head-on collisions of oblong uranium nuclei can take orientations between body-body and tip-tip (a) to produce a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) with varying shapes and sizes (b). These QGP characteristics drive distinct expansion patterns (c), leading to different distributions of emitted particles (d). By measuring the variation in these "flow" patterns from collision to collision and comparing them to collisions of near-spherical gold nuclei, scientists can extract the shape of the uranium nuclei.

Credit

Jiangyong Jia/Stony Brook University

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