  Heavy-ion collisions at small beam energies have the potential to reveal the
rich phase structure of QCD at nonzero temperature and density. Among the
possible phases are regimes which feature periodic modulations of the spatial
structure, where the energy spectrum is shaped like a moat, with the minimum of
the energy over a sphere at nonzero momentum. We argue that if the matter
created in heavy-ion collisions traverses such a regime, it can produce a
characteristic momentum dependence of particle number and their correlations.
As an explicit example, we consider a quantum pion liquid phase to compute
these quantities on the freeze-out surface. These results can serve as a first
guideline for a systematic search of spatially modulated phases in heavy-ion
collisions.
