Investigation of K${}^{+}$K${}^{-}$ interactions via femtoscopy in Pb$-$Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV at the LHC

Abstract

Femtoscopic correlations of non-identical charged kaons (${\mathrm{K}}^{+}{\mathrm{K}}^{-}$) are studied in Pb$-$Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon$-$nucleon collision $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV by ALICE at the LHC. One-dimensional ${\mathrm{K}}^{+}{\mathrm{K}}^{-}$ correlation functions are analyzed in three centrality classes and eight intervals of particle-pair transverse momentum. The Lednický and Luboshitz interaction model used in the ${\mathrm{K}}^{+}{\mathrm{K}}^{-}$ analysis includes the final-state Coulomb interactions between kaons and the final-state interaction through $a_0$(980) and $f_0$(980) resonances. The mass of $f_0$(980) and coupling were extracted from the fit to ${\mathrm{K}}^{+}{\mathrm{K}}^{-}$ correlation functions using the femtoscopic technique. The measured mass and width of the $f_0$(980) resonance are consistent with other published measurements. The height of the $\varphi$(1020) meson peak present in the ${\mathrm{K}}^{+}{\mathrm{K}}^{-}$ correlation function rapidly decreases with increasing source radius, qualitatively in agreement with an inverse volume dependence. A phenomenological fit to this trend suggests that the $\varphi$(1020) meson yield is dominated by particles produced directly from the hadronization of the system. The small fraction subsequently produced by final-state interactions could not be precisely quantified with data presented in this paper and will be assessed in future work.

24 pages, 4 captioned figures, 3 tables, authors from page 19, published version, figures at http://alice-publications.web.cern.ch/node/8682

References in corpus (7)

• K*(892)${}^0$ and $\Phi$(1020) production in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV
• Unveiling the strong interaction among hadrons at the LHC
• Study of the strong interaction among hadrons with correlations at the LHC
• Experimental evidence for an attractive p-$\varphi$ interaction
• Neutral Kaon Interferometry in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Investigating the role of strangeness in baryon$-$antibaryon annihilation at the LHC
• $\Lambda \mathrm{K}$ femtoscopy in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV

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• Exploring nuclear structure with multiparticle azimuthal correlations at the LHC