Heavy ion collisions: Correlations and Fluctuations in particle production

Abstract

Correlations and fluctuations (the latter are directly related to the 2-particle correlations) is one of the important directions in analysis of heavy ion collisions. At the current stage of RHIC exploration, when the details matter, basically any physics question is addressed with help of correlation techniques. In this talk I start with a general introduction to the correlation and fluctuation formalism and discuss weak and strong sides of different type of observables. In more detail, I discuss the two-particle $p_t$ correlations/$\mpt$ fluctuations. In spite of not observing any dramatic changes in the event-by-event fluctuations with energy, which would indicate a possible phase transition, such correlations measurements remain an interesting and important subject, bringing valuable information. Lastly, I show how radial flow can generate characteristic azimuthal, transverse momentum and rapidity correlations, which could qualitatively explain many of recently observed phenomena in nuclear collisions.

8 pages, 8 figures. Invited talk at 5th International Conference on Physics and Astrophysics of Quark Gluon Plasma, February 8-12, 2005, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, India

References in corpus (3)

• An Overview of Fluctuation and Correlation Results in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Correlations and Fluctuations
• Correlations and Fluctuations in STAR

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Methods for the Study of Transverse Momentum Differential Correlations
• Two particle differential transverse momentum and number density correlations in p-Pb and Pb-Pb at the LHC
• System size and energy dependence of the mean transverse momentum fluctuations at the LHC
• Multiplicity and transverse momentum dependence of charge-balance functions in pPb and PbPb collisions at LHC energies
• Two-particle number and transverse momentum balance function with event topology in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV
• System size and event shape dependence of particle-identified balance functions in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using PYTHIA 8 and EPOS models