Fate of the initial state perturbations in heavy ion collisions. II. Glauber fluctuations and sounds

Heavy-ion collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are well described by the (nearly ideal) hydrodynamics for average events. In the present paper we study initial state fluctuations appearing on an event-by-event basis and the propagation of perturbations induced by them. We found that (i) fluctuations of several of the lowest harmonics have comparable magnitudes and (ii) that at least all odd harmonics are correlated in phase, (iii) thus indicating the local nature of fluctuations. We argue that such local perturbations should be the source of the tiny bang, a pulse of sound propagating from it. We identify its two fundamental scales as (i) the sound horizon (analogous to the absolute ruler in cosmic microwave background and galaxy distributions) and (ii) the viscous horizon separating damped and undamped harmonics. We then qualitatively describe how one can determine them from the data and thus determine two fundamental parameters of the matter: the (average) speed of sound and viscosity. The rest of the paper explains how one can study mutual coherence of various harmonics. For that, one should go beyond the two-particle correlations to three (or more) particles. Mutual coherence is important for the picture of propagating sound waves.