Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Quantum fluctuations induce interesting structures in the initial state profiles for hydrodynamic calculations of the hot and dense quark-gluon plasma phase of heavy ion collisions. Especially, after the discovery of non-zero odd higher flow coefficients, there has been a lot of theoretical effort to quantify the correlation lengths of energy density fluctuations. A new method to characterize initial state profiles based on a 2D Fourier analysis is presented and an outlook on how this analysis can lead to a better quantitative understanding of the properties of hot and dense nuclear matter is given.