Correspondence between Hanbury-Brown-Twiss radii and the emission zone in noncentral heavy ion collisions
Abstract
In noncentral collisions between ultrarelativistic heavy ions, the freeze-out distribution is anisotropic, and its major longitudinal axis may be tilted away from the beam direction. The shape and orientation of this distribution are particularly interesting, as they provide a snapshot of the evolving source and reflect the space-time aspect of anisotropic flow. Experimentally, this information is extracted by measuring pion Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) radii as a function of angle with respect to the reaction plane. The connection between measured radius oscillations and the underlying geometry is necessarily model-dependent; many existing formulas are strictly valid only for Gaussian sources with no collective flow. With a realistic transport model of the collision, which generates flow and non-Gaussian sources, we find that these formulas approximately reflect the anisotropy of the freeze-out distribution.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review C
- Pub Date:
- July 2011
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevC.84.014908
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1012.5941
- Bibcode:
- 2011PhRvC..84a4908M
- Keywords:
-
- 25.75.Gz;
- 25.70.Pq;
- Particle correlations;
- Multifragment emission and correlations;
- Nuclear Theory;
- Nuclear Experiment
- E-Print:
- 9 pages, 8 figures