Mach cones in an evolving medium

The energy and momentum lost by a hard parton propagating through hot and dense matter has to be redistributed in the nuclear medium. Apart from heating the medium, there is the possibility that collective modes are excited. We outline a formalism that can be used to track the propagation of such a mode through the evolving medium if its dispersion relation is known. Under the assumption that a sound wave is created, we track the jet energy loss as a function of spacetime and follow the resulting mach cone throughout the fireball evolution.We compare with the angular correlation pattern of hard hadrons as obtained by the PHENIX collaboration and find good agreement with the data provided that a substantial fraction of jet energy ($\sim$ 90%) is deposited into a propagating mode and that the hot matter can be characterized by an EOS with a soft point (not necessarily a mixed phase).