Correspondence between Hanbury-Brown-Twiss radii and the emission zone in noncentral heavy ion collisions
- Department of Physics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 (United States)
- Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
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.
- OSTI ID:
- 21596605
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. C, Nuclear Physics, Vol. 84, Issue 1; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.84.014908; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2813
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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