2010/12/29 by Elliot Mount, Gunnar Graef, Michael Mitrovski +4
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.84.014908
published as Phys.Rev.C84:014908,2011 · 9 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2010/12/29 · openalex publication_date 2011/07/29 · arxiv updated 2011/08/22 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.